Customer Reviews

The System : Vol. 1, Figure Painting

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This is a quite excellent book on figure painting. The emphasis is on 120mm scale figures (Verlinden, of course) but you can (I did!) apply the principles to other scales, such as 1/35 or 54mm.

Though you always must experiment on your own (or else you won't learn anything), the book is a great help for getting started, and I always have it nearby whenever I'm painting figures.

I guess that with this book and Sheperd Paine's (on the same topic) you won't need anything else.

I have been model building for over 20 years, but only last year did I start painting figures. Most of my models had no figures or were done uninspired with acrylics. I finally decided to use oils and this book helped a lot with techniques for shading and highlighting. It's shortcoming was that they just said mix a base fleshtone, and add this color or that. I would really have liked ratios such as 4 parts raw umber, 1 part yellow ochre, etc. If it wasn't for my years of experience, I might have been been upset about this. Model building is a lot of trial and error and I had the patience to persevere, but a lot of paint was lost in these experiments. I can't say this is for someone with little experience but for model builders who can see a color and know what mix they need, it shouldn't be too much of a challenge.

The book overall was good. The only flaw is when it tells the oils to use but it doesn't tell the mix for the first step. It shows the oils layed out and has them labeld but in the text it doesn't tell what all of them are. Some you can go by the color but for the first step it just says mixture A, but it doesn't say what mixture A is. It could have used a few more step by step photos in the beginning also.

The authors describe their techniques for painting miniatures with oils. I found the "do it this way or else" tone somewhat condescending. The examples are not very useful as the most difficult step, bending, is not shown. He goes from unblended to blended without an intermediate steps.

Davidson's book "Painting Ancient and Medieval Warriors" is a better introductory text.