Winged colour attack

New project incoming!

A friend of mine and I backed the latest World of Twilight KS some months ago. You already saw what I did with some of the minis for my mutant tribe. But I had all the rest of the stuff pending. So it was time to start; I will be painting both mine and my friend's (I guess that by the end of the project I'll have trouble in identifying which minis are mine and which ones are comissioned!) :D

For a start I chose all the winged creatures. Lots of tiny models, but they would be fine to warm up the brushes and get into the mood. We agreed that an 'Avatar' approach would suit the minis. You can say a lot of things about that movie, but the design of the animals and stuff is certainly inspiring.

So let's get started! Avatar themed then. That means colour splash. Epileptic seizure would be too extreme maybe, but I could stay just one step behind that.

Rainbow flying lizards!

Avatar uses a predominant cold palette for all the creatures (but for the giant flying thing), so I stayed close to that, though I added a few warm colours to some of them; some variety seemed more pleasant to my eye.

I had terrible problems for the next stage. I committed myself to paint each one of them in a different way, and hard into the epileptic concept, with flamboyant patterns and gaudy colours all over. That went terribly wrong. It simply didn't work. From parrot-like schemes to WWII planes cammo, I made every kind of stupid mistake imaginable.

So I had to go back to square 1 again, breathe and begin all over. I had to see them not as individuals, but as swarms. Each model didn't have to incorporate twenty different colours, but just one predominant colour with patterns or whatever. I left the Avatar stuff aside and begun to google actual Amazonian frogs, lizards and whatever I could find. Then I saw it, oh, wise Mother Nature, you had it there for me to see and get inspiration. I came to the conclusion of leaving just one main colour for the body, light beige for the belly and lower membranes and darker tones of the main colour for the back.

I mean this:

So here are the Frenu swarms:

Casting for the Power Rangers pets

Besides, there are larger beasts, the two Kaopi and the Kosok:

Larger indeed

I dared to do different patterns here with more colours. These were the things that didn't work on a smaller scale, but looked better when at this size.

So this was it. The rest was just about the bases.

What a movie would Hitchcock have done out of these, not those dull birds...

Some close-ups:

Finally, the whole bunch:

Tiny and adorable

On the whole I must say that the real stuff proved to be more inspirational than the movie concept arts, which is quite unexpected. I'll dig in on that way for future references, but for the moment these are quite a start for the project.

More coming soon!