Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

A funny thing happened yesterday. The story doesn't really have a point but I think it's too good not to share.

So yesterday, I was playing a game of AoS at a FLGS. I had just finished the first model of my new Sylvaneth army and it was on the table among the rest of my primed army. Someone came in, came over to our table and observed the battle for a bit. When my painted model died, the spectator asked if he could take a closer look at the model. I said sure and gave it to him.

He carefully studied it and went "mhhh, looks good. I don't know what paints you used on that rock. I always use Dawnstone as a highlight to make them look more realistic, is that what you did?". I simply replied: "No, it's just a rock. I didn't use Dawnstone, in fact I didn't use any paint to highlight it". He told me: "Yes, I can see it's a rock. Don't get me wrong, I think it's really well painted. It's just that it popped into my mind that it might look more like a real rock if you added a highlight to it."
I just stood there a bit taken aback and asked him: "Wait, you want me to add paint to this rock I grabbed from my driveway so it looks more like a real rock? How does that work?". It finally hit him that I had in fact used a real rock on my base and he had just told someone to paint a real rock to look more like a real rock.

We all burst out laughing (including the guy himself) and overall had a great time after that. It was one of those moments that goes into the chronicles of any good gaming group. It was well meant advice but boy is he going to hear that one for a long long time!

You should paint your rock though. Unpainted real rocks may be more realistic, but they don't look right next to painted models, painted dirt, etc.

DaPino wrote:
"Wait, you want me to add paint to this rock I grabbed from my driveway so it looks more like a real rock? How does that work?"

Yes.

Unpainted rocks look like unpainted rocks, which in turn look out of place next to a painted miniature. A fast and easy way to paint a rock is to prime it white then put blobs of a couple of different colors of oil paints (brown, green, yellow, grey, etc.) all over it and then use a rag to blend it all in and remove the excess.

Miniatures are pretty much exclusively painted in an exaggerated fashion, so to have something realistic next to a model that is painted exaggerated the "realistic" thing will actually look abnormally plain.

So the guy who told you to paint the rock was right, paint the rock

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Miniatures are pretty much exclusively painted in an exaggerated fashion, so to have something realistic next to a model that is painted exaggerated the "realistic" thing will actually look abnormally plain.

So the guy who told you to paint the rock was right, paint the rock

Exactly!

i use Slate on some bases.

but im not paitning slate, to look more like slate because its meant to be slate.

plain black, dark texture does not jar.

It is a weird phenomenon though when you think about it. But totally agree that the rock needs to be a painted rock to be more like a rock

If the rock looks bland next to the painted model, all the better.

It's not meant to DRAW the eye away from the model after all.

 chromedog wrote:
If the rock looks bland next to the painted model, all the better.

It's not meant to DRAW the eye away from the model after all.

But when the blandness of the rock creates a contrast it can take away from the model. It's all about creating a cohesive look, if you can manage that with an unpainted rock, that's fine, but more often than not it's newbie painters putting pebbles on a base and they look out of place.

 chromedog wrote:
If the rock looks bland next to the painted model, all the better.

It's not meant to DRAW the eye away from the model after all.

It's not that it's bland, it's that it does draw the eye, because it doesn't look right against the painted miniature. Partly to do with exaggerated highlights, and partly I think to do with the finish of the paint... Having an unpainted rock on the base is every bit as jarring as it would be if you, say, left unpainted some parts of your miniature that you want to be grey.

It may seem counter-intuitive on the surface, but having everything painted creates a more cohesive piece.

It's to do with scale, as well. Ask yourself why we add highlights and shade to models in the first place. The light falling on a model will create shadows and highlights itself, won't it? But we're trying to create the illusion that what we're putting on the table is not a little toy soldier, but a representation of a seven-foot-tall warrior. Light falling on larger things creates darker shadows, as the recesses the shadows sit in are by definition deeper. That's why we paint exaggerated shade and highlights onto miniatures - to make them look like a larger thing shrunk down.

So a rock with no shade and highlights on will look like a small stone, but even doing something as simple as putting a few layers of agrax earthshade wash onto the areas of shadow will start to create the illusion of it actually being a large rock. It's kind of bizarre, but if you try it, you will see the effect.

Exactly. You're painting a pebble to look like a boulder.

Maybe he saw Dwayne Johnson face in that rock?

Remind me next time I make a picture to Grand Canyon to photo edit the rocks so they can look more human.

Paint your rock.
You need to force the scale on that as well as your models.

The reason that we shade and highlight miniatures is that they are too small to cast their own shadows, otherwise we could just paint them in flat colour.

 feltmonkey wrote:
It's to do with scale, as well. Ask yourself why we add highlights and shade to models in the first place. The light falling on a model will create shadows and highlights itself, won't it? But we're trying to create the illusion that what we're putting on the table is not a little toy soldier, but a representation of a seven-foot-tall warrior. Light falling on larger things creates darker shadows, as the recesses the shadows sit in are by definition deeper. That's why we paint exaggerated shade and highlights onto miniatures - to make them look like a larger thing shrunk down.

 Alex Kolodotschko wrote:
The reason that we shade and highlight miniatures is that they are too small to cast their own shadows, otherwise we could just paint them in flat colour.

I don't really think that's true, light travels in straight lines.

A small model creates its own shadows just fine, in fact when you photograph models you usually point lights at it from so many different directions to stop it creating its own shadows

It's just when details are small they tend to get lost, so we tend to paint them exaggerated to make them stand out more.

The other thing is sometimes models actually have soft details. You can't cast hard edges or sharp corners, an "edge" on a model actually has some radius to it and if you blew the model up to real scale you'd find many models actually look very soft because of that, so sometimes you paint a sharp edge highlight because the edge itself isn't sharp, or you paint a dark line to represent a hard crevice because the actual model has a soft crevice which would produce a soft shadow instead of a sharp shadow.

It is true the scale and lighting is different so painting the small rock to look like a big rock is the better statement.
I have been interested in the opposite: making pictures of real things look like miniatures.
http://www.photoshopstar.com/photo-effects/photos-look-like-miniatures/
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/11/beautiful-examples-of-tilt-shift-photography/
My parents have a car sized boulder in the back yard, it is safe to say I have never seen a pebble that looks anything like it, other than of course being a rock.

I would also say that shadows in recesses are not as distinct as with real larger objects, diffused light really kills that detail.
A miniature is like with paintings where you have to add most of your visual detail.
Look again how that "tilt shift" adjustment makes real pictures look miniature, so making a pebble to look like a rock requires the opposite effect.

 Talizvar wrote:
I have been interested in the opposite: making pictures of real things look like miniatures.
http://www.photoshopstar.com/photo-effects/photos-look-like-miniatures/
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/11/beautiful-examples-of-tilt-shift-photography/

That's doing 2 things, one is "scale effect" in reverse (when painting small models you use slightly faded colours to make them look more realistic, that link is doing the opposite, making colours more vibrant so it looks like there's less distance between the camera and the object).

http://www.cybermodeler.com/color/scale_effect.shtml

Secondly it's adding lens effects that come about when you photograph small objects (depth of field and lens warping).

"Tilt shift" is more about effects specific to the differences in photography than it is about light behaving differently on small objects than big objects.

Paul Budzik goes in to some of the details I was talking about previously where models tend to have softer details than their real scale counterparts, so rather than it being the light behaving differently, it's actually that the model is a softer representation of the real thing...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jw10q01gv8

Before you put paint on a model just for the sake of interest, take a photo of it with a good camera and zoom in so that the model's head is as big as a real head, I think you'll find the detail is incredibly soft compared to a real object.

In the context of a pebble, depending on what sort of pebble it is you probably also have the effect of the smallest crags and crevices on a zoomed in pebble are likely far larger than those of a boulder.

It's something I've noticed more as I have moved to painting scale models of real military vehicles. The closer you can get to having a scale-accurate shape, the less you have to "fake" lighting with shading/highlights because light will behave as it should on the real object. In the context of wargaming models, for one it's not practical to go round making the model look more realistic before applying paint and secondly you usually want to exaggerate the details so they pop more, you actually want them to be hyper-realistic to compensate for the fact it's the equivalent of looking at a person on the other side of a football field

however, miniatures by definition do have softer details than their real size counterparts. The folds of a cloth cloak on a miniature have less space for shadows, even if they are modeled 100% accurately, than the folds of a life sized cloak. There are two ways to counteract this: paint exaggerated shadows and highlights, or use a lighting setup that exaggerates the shadows and creates less diffusion. Since we tend to want diffused light when we photograph miniatures in order to see them better and allow for depth of focus, we really do need those shadows exaggerated. If this weren't the case, the most realistic looking miniatures would be just base coated.

 Gordon Shumway wrote:
The folds of a cloth cloak on a miniature have less space for shadows, even if they are modeled 100% accurately, than the folds of a life sized cloak.

If the cloak isn't realistically creating shadows I think you'll find if you examine the miniature cloak closely, due to the limitations of casting it most likely doesn't follow the folds of a real life cloak.

Cloaks aren't something you see heaps of in real life anyway, just look at clothing and you'll see scale models usually aren't capable of reproducing the creases and folds that occur on real clothing. So you paint the creases darker to exaggerate the shape.

If this weren't the case, the most realistic looking miniatures would be just base coated.

The most realistic models are the ones that are as close to 100% accurate and painted the same colours (which may or may not be monotone, depends on the subject, skin isn't monotone for example) except maybe a touch paler.

But we rarely (if ever) grade miniature painting by realism, so that's fine, things don't have to look realistic, it's fine if they look exaggerated. It's far easier to achieve an exaggerated look and many people will subjectively say it looks better anyway.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
If the cloak isn't realistically creating shadows I think you'll find if you examine the miniature cloak closely, due to the limitations of casting it most likely doesn't follow the folds of a real life cloak..

You can use any example, though. A recess that's 10mm deep is going to create deeper shadow than a recess that's 1mm deep. So a 1/10th size miniature is not going to create shadows as deep as its original, no matter how accurately it is sculpted.