The Painty Bit:
To define how highlights
affect the face, I will work from the eyes out. The eyes themselves are normally in a mild shadow. The jaw line and lower
cheeks will have a lighter appearance. Next in lightness are the upper sections of the cheekbones the upper, lower lip and
chin. Followed by the Forehead, Eyebrow ridge and then the Nose.
With the definition of the highlighted
areas, I need to draw your attention to where shadow toned areas occur; which are below the jaw line around the throat, the
nasal crease to the sides of the mouth, below the bottom lip, below the nasal tip and the nostrils. In specific expressions
the forehead wrinkles and shadow tones are present between the forehead and the eyebrow ridges. In very strong emotional displays
the eyes also tend to have increased shadows due to the effect of the furrowing of the forehead.
When we look at people’s faces we see the transitions between
highlights, shadows and creases as very smooth. But for the miniature world, especially those miniatures around 25/28mm, the
highlights and shadows have to be dramatically differentiated in order to seem realistic.
To demonstrate I have the following three pictures, one without alteration, the second with increased highlights/shadows
and the third reduced in size to scale around 28mm.
I have adjusted the second picture to show the areas of the face
that have the greatest highlights and shadow tones. At this size, the picture looks as if I had war paint on my face. However,
as you can see from the greatly reduced picture there is not a lot of contrast, and the effective definition of the face is
not as strong.
In essence, how we paint the face of a miniature is by bringing
those areas that would be natural highlights up to a greater level of brightness, and the shadow tones taken down to a stronger
depth than we would see naturally.
In order to define the face in 28mm scale, the levels of contrast need to be quite strong to compensate for the small
scale. Consequently, in order to define the expressions the painting needs to be exaggerated to make the effect work. Where
on an actual face the shadows are smooth and blend into the rest of the tonality, on a 28mm figure the staging of the colours
needs to be stronger and with fewer stages between basecoat and highlights.
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