Goblin Referee

Following the Ogre Sportscaster, this is the second of three figures I started to paint with Arcane Paintworks. He's a the Goblin Referee from the excellent Willy Miniatures (again) but painted up as an annoying little human - as I haven't yet seen goblins make an appearance in Guild Ball.

He's quite a small fellow too - compared to his colleague the Ogre. Smaller than a standard 28mm character and here's a scale shot to demonstrate the difference ...

The challenges here were:

• Use non-skintones for my shading. This adds a depth of colour and interest that's usually lacking in my skin work, and while my highlighting still needs practice I was delighted with the shading side of things - even if it was a little OTT.
• Paint four stages of eye following this guide. I managed to squeeze all four in here, as you can see from the top picture. This felt like quite an achievement considering the scale and space to work in. Moreso when you consider I only used a size 2 brush for the eyes to get that done.

At this point I genuinely feel my painting is starting to progress.

Ogre Sportscaster

This is the first of three figures I started painting during my painting course with Arcane Paintworks, and the focus was the jacket and face. He's an Ogre Sportscaster from the excellent Willy Miniatures and having looked at this month's White Dwarf, he bears more than a passing resemblance to their cartoon figures advertising Blood Bowl, but moving on ...

The base is very vanilla as he'll be standing to the side of the pitch mocking my Guild Ball players. The painting challenges for me here were:

• Highlight with a colour I wouldn't normally use. So there's a lot of yellow to work up from the base colour of tan ... you can see some areas of the figure were less successful than others, and that's fine. They're my little, horrible badges of honour while I got to grips with techniques. 
• Getting to grips with shading using a two-brush blending/feathering technique. Hard, hard, hard. My brain needs to think about this more, and my hands need more practice - but it started coming together after the first few tries.
• Try to use less colours on a figure. This worked well to make everything else a gentle background to try and emphasise the angry face.

I threw in some extreme highlighting on black trousers, as they were the last item on the figure to do and I'd painted myself into a corner.