Family Painting: Arcadia Quest - Riders

In March, I wrote about how much fun my family had painting Arcadia Quest. We had so much fun, in fact, that when I found the Riders expansion on sale, I jumped on it. This set contains several miniatures in conventional scale, but its raison d'etre is really the giant mounts. One of the first challenges I faced, then, was how to prime, paint, and varnish these without handling them? Unlike the other figures, the mounts have no bases that could just be easily glued to a cork or a block.

Looking around the Web, I came across a post that showed how a painter had pinned his figure to some kind of block. This seemed to me to be the best way to go, so I looked around for something to use as a handle. I had a spare square of exercise mat foam that my son and I had prepped to be used as Frostgrave terrain years ago, but we stopped playing that game before making the scenery. Unbelievably, no one had tossed it in the interim, so I cut out a chunk to try. I stuck a paperclip into it, but it didn't hold fast until I superglued it into place. I proceeded to drill holes in the figures and secure both ends of the pin with a dot of superglue. This worked well, being surprisingly steady. I did try to splay out the pins slightly so that the angle would give a little extra strength, but I didn't have an orthogonal test model to verify whether this helped.

Mounting Mounts

Mounted Mounts after zenithal prime

After deliberation and consideration, we decided that my two older boys and I would each paint two mounts, we three would split the heroes and big bad, and each member of the family would paint one of the jacklols. A lot of this set then was done in evening painting sessions with the big boys while my wife sat with us and worked on other crafts. 

We started with the trio of BawkBawk, Luda, and Tianlong. The boys picked theirs first, and I took BawkBawk not because I was particularly excited to paint it. Rather, I knew that yellow was a tricky color to paint, and I figured I was most prepared for the challenge. I took the following WIP image after spending the first night just trying to get the yellows in place. I think there's three coats of just the base color there, and then I used two-brush blending to layer in the shadows and then the highlights. I'm really happy with the result. Maybe it's kind of silly to spend this much time on a knock-off chocobo, but hey, it's a hobby.

BawkBawk WIP after the first painting session

Here are the finished first trio:

BawkBawk, Tianlong, and Luda

These are in descending age order by painter. After the first night, we talked about our progress and I gave them some advice on how to proceed. In both cases, I was really encouraging them to increase the contrast. Luda—who is a little washed out in that picture—was essentially all one tone originally. I showed #2 Son how to thin out some shade and paint it into the recesses, and it looks a lot better. I think #1 Son knocked Tianlong out of the park. Notice the spot of white he put into the eyes to make them look reflective: that's a pro move from a 13-year-old.

Here is the second set of mounts:

Beka, Toshi, and Hornsteady

These are also in descending age order by painter. I had been kind of excited to paint Hornsteady for a similar reason to my interest in BawkBawk: it's basically all armor with very little sculpted detail, and that seemed like an interesting painting challenge. However, #2 Son decided that was the one for him. Fortunately, #1 Son took Toshi, which was the only one I was really uninterested in.

Once again, we painted in two nights, and they checked in with me after the first night. And, once again, I encouraged contrast. Like Luda before him, Hornsteady was basically all one tone: silver paint over the whole thing. We talked again about thinning out shades and painting them into the recesses. After that, Hornsteady was much improved, and accenting the contrast on Toshi helped make him more visually interesting as well.

I am actually really proud of Beka, which is kind of silly, because it's some kind of battle owl in a bra. Why is it wearing a bra? To have a "feminine" mount? Do they know that birds are not mammals? One of my sons pointed out that what I described as a bra could actually be goggles that are hung around the neck. I suppose that's possible, but if so, the goggles wouldn't work at all: they are not shaped to Beka's head, nor is there a cutout for the beak. End rant.

The point is, I'm proud of the work I did on the feathers. I think I got a nice slightly-brown grey tone, similar to what one would find on a real bird. Mostly, I am proud of the texture on the wings. Unlike BawkBawk's smooth shading, I used brushtrokes to imply a texture that's not sculpted in, and I think it really sells. The spots I added are much smaller than the ones in the card art, and of course I was afraid to go in and drop spots over something I was so happy with, but these too turned out well.

For reference, and because it is my blog after all, here are the two I did, next to each other.

BawkBawk and Beka: The Mounts I Painted

I was not eager to paint Malkhor, the Big Bad, but #1 Son said he would do it. Let's look at him next.

Makhor, front 

Malkhor, Back

I think he did a great job with this one. He got some nice shade into the muscles to help them stand out. You can see some of the transitions on the cape, but that's OK: a nigh-featureless cape that large is hard to paint, and it shows his progression in the use of blending. Keep in mind that, as before, we're just using the Vallejo Basic Colors, so no fancy glaze mediums or anything like that.

Meanwhile, #2 Son and I worked on the two heroes from this expansion: Gaston and Colette.

Gaston and Colette

I was excited to try my hand at Gaston, following the theme of "Let's try painting some challenging colors." I worked on practically just the black and white during our first painting session, while my son nearly finished Colette. She was looking pretty stark, in solid whites and blacks. In the next session though, he did some much nicer work adding greys to highlight the black and shade the white. I think he did a nice job with this. Also, it's an easy detail to miss, but I think he did a nice job on the scarf.

Here are a few more close-ups of Gaston:

No one fronts like Gaston

Faces back like Gaston

The big chunky tail was tricky to paint around, but I am happy with how it turned out. Normally, I take an inside-out approach—painting the skin, then the lowest layer of clothes, and working outward. With him, this was tricky, because the colors of his fur are the same in the innermost levels like his arms and the outermost level of his tail. I am happy with how the blends came together. As usual, I copied the colors from the card art, and I think the artist did a good job accenting the black, white, and browns with bursts of saturated red, green, and orange.

 As I mentioned above, I find myself generally turning to two-brush blending these days, starting with a mid color, painting in shades, and then adding highlights. I like being able to see the basic colors in place before shading and highlighting, and this has been working for me better than starting with the shade layers like I used to.

Finally, we get to the whole family painting part: Jacklols! In truth, I thought they were "Jackols" and wondered why my son was pronouncing it so strangely, until I read the card name more carefully.

Jacklols, just lolling around

Each member of the family got one, and the photo shows them in increasing order by painter age. My wife and I spent the longest on ours, and by the end, we both felt the palette was a bit dull. Still, it was a good place to practice some fundamental techniques.

This is a good place to mention the strange lighting in the cards. Here's an image from the Kickstarter campaign:

Jacklol Cart Art

Notice how they all have a sort of magenta backlighting whose impact varies a bit depending on which background is used for the figure. Indeed, the other art has this design as well, which I think contributes to different interpretations of figures like Beka: I saw it as a grey owl with reddish light, while others have seen it as brown or red itself. In any case, it was interesting to hear how my boys were surprised at #3 Son's interpretation of the Jacklol fur as being pink. My wife and I agreed that this was a reasonable interpretation of the art. Whether #4 Son really thought the armor should be reddish-purple—or if that's just what the five-year-old ended up with on his palette—is lost to history. In any case, they give us a nice bit of variation on the table. Indeed, it is a variation that has me eyeballing my boxes of unpainted Massive Darkness mobs.

Here are some close-ups of my Jacklol:

Jacklol, out of clever caption ideas

Jacklol turning his backlol on us

It's kind of a combination of smooth blending of light colors as an BawkBawk with the random dark spots of Beka. I thought I had finished all the fur when one of my sons commented about the "eyebrows" on his own miniature, that he had thought they were part of the helmet. I had done the same thing, and fortunately, my fur colors were still wet, so I could go in and add the eyebrows. Truly, the eyebrows-over-helmet design adds a lot of life to what would otherwise be a less interesting face.

That's all for today's painting write-up. Thanks for coming along!