My First Commission Work: A Bear

As is sometimes the case with obsessions, people whom exhibit obsessive tendencies sometimes see support groups form around them. These support groups are formed to help encourage or help impede the obsession. Miniature painting has become my obsession. Thankfully, the support group that has formed around me has been one of encouragement rather than hindrance. Good thing too! As an act of kindness (or perhaps an act of pity) a member of my support group reached out to me a month ago to inquire about painting a miniature for her. She even offered to pay me! If you've been keeping up with my posts, you've seen my work. Therefore you should find this as incredulous as I did. However, I am not a proud individual, so I bowed to the request to get paid to paint a miniature for some one. Here's the end result.

A bit of background regarding the request: the best friend of my fiancé lives some distance away (for convenience sake, let's call this individual "Katy"). So "Katy" and her fiancé has a friend that is a bit of a D&D nerd (we all have that one friend, no shame) and it just so happened that his birthday was coming up. As it stood, Katy's friend has a character in D&D that poly-morphs into multiple creatures, one of which is a grizzly bear. Also, Katy's friend doesn't really bother with painting his own miniatures, or so I was told (I know right?). Anyway, Katy wanted to get this individual something for his upcoming birthday. So she requested that I paint a grizzly miniature that she was going to have shipped to my address. How could I say no?

The miniature in question comes form the WizKids Deep Cuts line and if memory serves, Katy purchased the miniature from this site. We both looked at a few options, but in the end we settled on this miniature for two specific purposes: it was cheap, and if I screwed things up, no biggie. Well Katy liked the miniature because it was cheap. I liked it because when I inevitably screwed up, I could get another at low cost and not mention this to Katy. Luckily this didn't happen. Right... moving on!

My strategy for the Grizzly miniature was pretty simple, and it was per Katy's wishes: make the bear 

like a bear. Nuff said. Like much of my painting lately, I wanted to focus on details and realism so the request was pretty easy to follow. I couldn't really tell you what day I started on this (or when I really finished either). What I can tell you is that the painting itself took about two hours, and I spent way too much time trying to be creative with the base.

First a discussion on the painting: I went with a very traditional brown (I think it was Oak Brown from the Army Painter). I gave the entire miniature a base coat of the brown, touched up any trouble areas, then went with a Strong Tone wash for the classic shadowing effect. After waiting for the wash to dry, I reconstituted the oak brown with a bit of off-white base paint and water to create a lighter shade for the dry-brushing. After the highlights were put down, I did a bit of detail work on the claws, mouth, nose, and eyes. I used three different shades for the mouth: off-white for the teeth, and two different shades of red for the tongue and the roof of the mouth. I applied a little bit of Flesh Tone wash where needed. I went really simple with the claws: a base grey and then a bit lighter grey for the highlights. for the Nose, I used a simple matt black and a touch of highlighting. For the eyes, I wanted to give the bear a bit of a menacing look, so I went with a glistening red (normally used for blood/flesh effects). The end result is as you see.

Since it took me barely any time to paint, and since this wasn't my miniature anyway, I wanted to experiment a bit with the base. When I first started painting miniatures, I went to my local hobby shop and bought some terrain effects. So far, I hadn't used any of the supplies on my Kingdom Death miniatures (what I bought didn't fit with the "feel" of the miniatures). Therefore, I decided to try the terrain effects on the Grizzly miniature. The actual time spent on the base was maybe an hour, but it spanned over the course of a week. This was primarily due to the time it took for the glue to fully dry, and because I was working on my own KDM stuff, too.

For the base, I wanted to implement two elements: ballast and coarse turf. I had an Iron Ore Ballast from Woodland Scenics (the gravel bits) that I decided to put down around the miniature. I also had a Dark Green Coarse Turf, also from Woodland Scenics (the brush bits), that I placed over the ballast. The end effect is as you see. I had issues with the ballast setting haphazardly over the base. I also had an issue of the turf flaking off rather excessively. To counter these two issues, I basically lightly shaved the ballast till it was more level. I also glued an additional base to the model and glued the ballast around the sides to have it droop down a bit over the rim of the original base. I did this because segments of the ballast were clumping around the edges, and I wanted it to look more consistent throughout. After it fully dried, I used an exact-o knife and cut the excess ballast along the seam of the two bases. It 

came out OK. For the turf, I just kept wiping off the excess till it stopped flaking. I'm less happy with how that bit looked, but it was an experiment after all. Sometimes they don't come out so great. I guess the next time I try to make a custom base, I'll read up on some proper techniques beforehand. Good idea, right?

So all in all, not a bad job for a first commission. Given that the original model was $3.99, could do a hell of a lot worse. I know that Katy said she liked the end result a lot, or maybe she's just very nice and pretty good at lying. Mind you, I'm very trusting in general, so it's pretty very easy to lie to me. Just an FYI. Hopefully the individual whom gets this for his birthday will like it.

So that's pretty much it. I hope that you enjoyed the showcase of my first commissioned work. Please feel free share any comments or critiques. If you find my blog enjoyable, be sure to follow and subscribe. Oh, and if for some crazy reason you would be interested in getting me to do some commission work, please leave a comment or send an email to ampainter.blog@gmail.com. 

Happy painting!