Presenting My Newest Nemesis: The Gold Smoke Knight (painted 2/7/19)

"A flash of light splits the darkness, illuminating the approaching shape of an enormous knight holding a massive ornate maul. Great plumes of inky smoke pour from every gap of the knight's golden armor. The Gold Smoke Knight speaks in an unknown language, a hollow metallic voice echoing from its armor. It stands at ease, awaiting its challengers."

- Excerpt from Kingdom Death: Monster, The Gold Smoke Knight Showdown

When I first got the Kingdom Death: Monster Core Game, one of the miniatures that I found most intriguing from a hobbyist perspective was the Gold Smoke Knight. The Gold Smoke Knight was one of the first miniatures that I put together, and back then, that's as far as I wanted to go. Given how a lot of other miniature painters represented the Gold Smoke Knight, I didn't want to paint this bad boy till I was able to give it the justice it deserved. Fast forward seven months later and I decided to give GSK a try. Not because I'm good enough to tackle the miniature, but because I just wanted to.

The first part that I worked on was the base of the miniature. Luckily I wasn't dumb enough to attach the GSK to the base when I first put the miniature together (I haven't been as lucky with other miniatures).

For the most part, my strategy for the base was to create a dark stone base coat with subsequent lighter coats. Pretty typical of me; however, I did want to try something different with the flames and smoke. before I started painting I looked at a lot of variations of the GSK miniature on the KDM Collector site. There's some excellent work on that site including some very detailed feathering work for the flames. I did note that out of all the examples there, no one did any green variant flames, so I decided I wanted to try out that color.

After the necessary priming, I started with a dark grey base on skull faces. After a few coats, I put down some dark tone wash to really accentuate the shadows. I went very liberal with the wash coats to have the crevices and the eye sockets really pop out.

After going a bit crazy with the wash, I began to put down the dry-brush coats. As usual, I started with a slightly lighter hue of the base coat, and then reapplied further coats of even lighter tones still I got the end result pictured.  I tried a slightly different method with the dry-brushing for the base; I used a different dry-brush than I typically use. Also, this time when dry-brushed a surface, I brushed from random directions. I had noted in the past that a lot of my finished dry-brush areas had obvious painting streaks, which detracted from the natural look of the highlights. This time, I attempted to paint from different directions, thereby effectively removing any obvious paint lines. While I'm not one to boast, I think that the end result is the best dry-brushing job I've done so far.

After finishing the grey bits, it was time to do the flames. Fun. Like other GSK painters, the feathering technique has been utilized to give a transitioning tone in the flame. I've attempted the feathering technique before on other miniatures (The Lion God, The Sun Stalker, and The Lion Knight to name a few) but my experiences were minimal. Still, nothing ventured...

I started with the lightest tone of pale green and then went darker in the hues as I came closer to the tips of the flames. On most areas, I created at least five different blended hues of green to put down. My tactic was a bit different from what I've read and seen on YouTube; I basically painted each tone in a solid area, then tried a bit of dry-brushing to get the hues to blend seamlessly into one another. Light to dark, light to dark. I also went ahead and used the same hues to accent the eyes in the skull sockets, just to add a bit more depth to the base. In the end the flames came out great (the eyes were alright) and good thing too. If the end result looked like shit, I probably would have given up on painting the rest of the miniature for at least a while. So with the base all nicely painted, I moved on to the miniature itself. 

I predicted that the GSK would be the easier part to paint of the two components. The main reason is because the Gold Smoke Knight is just so damned big! Even though he stands on a 50mm base, this miniature is larger than typical, and a larger canvas typically means less really small details that need to be painted, at least in my experiences. Yay! As I began painting, I quickly learned that I was right, for the exception of the flame and smoke components.

You may have already guessed this, but the first part of GSK that I painted was the armor itself. The armor represented the largest surface area and I wanted this area completely painted before I began with the more detail oriented areas such as the leather areas and the flame areas. For the base, I used the greedy gold metallic paint from the Army Painter. A Note about Army Painter metallic paints: I've learned that Army Painter paints are a bit cheaper relative to a lot of other brands for a reason: they can a bit finicky in consistency (really thinking about getting those metallics beads for mixing), they dry almost immediately after leaving the bottle, thus congealing on the miniature and creating textural issues. These issues are doubly apparent in the metallics. As such, I always water down metallic paints before using and always keep a close eye to maintain the watered down consistency. The plus side to this is that when you apply enough layers to the miniature, the surface area can look really good, with minimal textural imperfections. The down side of course is that you've got to paint the bastard a bunch of times. Still, I guess this is why they say "you get what you pay for." Anywho I put down a few layers of the metallic paint over all armor areas of the GSK and I also went and did the maul as well.

Once I got the base down, I actually hit a bit of a wall. before even starting the miniature, I had a good understanding of the entire palette that I intended to use. I knew what color I'd use for the base

of the flames, the smoke, the armor, even the leather components. However, I had been debating what color I wanted the fur cape to be since I began. In the end I decided on a dark grey. Originally I didn't want to do this color since I've used it so often on different miniatures and I began worry that the grey fur cape as played out. Still, it made a lot of sense to use - the color contrasted well with the armor and really would make the gold pop. Also, it was a natural color that one would find from a beast in the wild.

So I put down a few layers of the darker grey till I got a consistent tone. Afterwards, I went ahead and used my trusty dark tone wash. Side note: I use the dark tone was a lot! It was when I started working on the GSK that I realized that I probably even overuse the dark tone wash; I've already had to buy another bottle from one of my local hobby shops. Anyway, I put down a splash of the wash, making sure to go a bit heavier on the bits that warranted more shadowing. After the wash set, I went ahead and took the  original grey base I used and created a lighter tone with the help of off-white paint. I grabbed the same brush I used for the dry-brushing on the base and applied a light coating on the fur cape. I did this a few times till I saw a consistent lighter tone develop. I then added more off-white and applied another dry-brush coat. Of course, each additional time I applied coats, I did so more lightly than previous. The only exception are the areas that would experience light - these areas got a heftier brushing of the lighter tones. Although the end result wasn't amazing, it was a solid job and like I hoped, it contrasted very well with the gold armor.

After the fur cape was done, I actually decided to go back and apply the details to the Gold

Smoke Knight's armor. Normally I like to get all the base coats down before moving on to the shadowing, highlighting, and any other miscellaneous details. However, I really wanted to have all the other work done before I tackled the flames. The reasoning was that once I wouldn't have to worry about accidentally painting the flames a wrong color because I was still working on the surrounding body parts. So I went about finishing up the armor by first applying a hefty amount of (you guessed it) dark tone wash to the chinks in the armor. I started first at the belly and then worked my way outwards. When I was applying wash I wanted to do so as to create an illusion that the center of the belly was glowing. I tried to create this effect by applying the wash lightly on the belly and then more prominently the further away I got from the epicenter. There were two reasons to this:

1. I kind of see the Gold Smoke Knight as more of a corporeal entity; it has no real physical presence other than the armor. It's all just smoke and mirrors inside, and as such I wanted to give a sense of the entity inside glowing enough to illuminate the armor.

2. I thought the effect sounded cool in my head and even if I fucked it up royally, it'd be a good bit of practice.

Anyway, as the pictures hopefully show, I added more wash as I moved out from the belly, and of course added extra anywhere else that I decided necessary. However, in order to really drill this effect home, I decided to create a bit of highlights to the armor itself. Now I've tried to create lighter tone metallic paint blends for the purpose of dry-brushing or other methods of highlighting with mixed results. This time I wanted to try something a bit different. While I was putting down the dark tone washes to the crevices of the armor, I also went about putting down a very light coat of the wash to the entire surface of the armor, thereby bringing down the color tones. So in order to accent the glowing effect of the belly, I reapplied the base metallic lightly to the necessary areas. While the experiment wasn't a complete success, it did work to a degree, enough so that I would actually be quite interested in trying out this experiment again. We will see if I have better success next time.

So after I got the necessary detailing done on the armor, I worked on any other bits I could find: the belt, the cloth dangling between the crotch (is this part of a tabard or a loin cloth?) the maul - pretty much every bit I could find till there was nothing left other than... duh, duh, duhhhhhhhh, the flames! Of course, there's a good reason why I was hesitant to work on this bit: it was the most challenging part and it required expert feathering in a small space. Still, I had to try.

So my strategy for the flames and the smoke on the GSK was the same strategy that I implemented with the flames on the base. The only difference was that I was trying to go more detailed with the flames on the miniature itself, especially with regards to the flames around the head. By more detailed, I basically mean that I created seven different shades that needed to be expertly applied. I won't waste your time repeating the step-by-step process (I already went over it when I was talking about painting the base) so I'll skip that bit. What I will say is that, as expected, this was the most challenging bit of the entire miniature. It was also the most rewarding. Successfully painting the flames and the smoke was not unlike taking out a really difficult boss in any Dark Souls game: it's always a major pain in the ass - so much so that you want to kill something in real life afterwards (maybe that pain-in-the ass cat that keeps mewling for food all the damned time!). But when you finally kill that son-of-a-bitch (the boss, not the cat) you feel this euphoria of satisfaction sweep over you. Finishing the flames were kinda like that.

Another side note: while I was working on the flames it was over the course of several mornings (I usually paint in the mornings before work). Strangely, each time I started painting, I kept finding areas on the flames

were the paint  chipped, and I had to reapply the necessary paint. I swear that fucking cat is trying to sabotage me...

So with the completion of the flames and the smoke, the GSK was more or less complete. Given the attention to detail I gave the miniature, I went over it a few times to make sure that I was satisfied with what was done, and that was that. Oh, one other thing to point out when using the very difficult and time consuming feathering technique: you don't really need to add shadowing or highlights to the process. If you're doing it really well the shadowing and highlighting occur organically.

So I know that this miniature took me maybe 5 days to finish (again, painting usually just in the mornings) but it was a really fun time. A bit stressful worrying about executing the flames well, but it was well worth it.

All in all, this was another very fun experience. I came into this one with the expectation that I wouldn't do as well as I did. The experience was invaluable - especially with the opportunity to do some really detailed feather work. And while the palette isn't completely original, I'm glad that my choice of color scheme worked well.  I've said it before, I'm sure I'll say it again, but it's still worth pointing out: this is arguably my best work yet. I love being able to say this because I find

that besides just loving miniature painting, to me it's important to see improvement. If I put out work after work after work and I don't see any real improvement, then I worry that I'll inevitably lose my love of the hobby. I don't want that to happen. Being able to see consistent improvement helps to keep me motivated. I hope that same thing happens to all of us whom love the work we do.

As always, I hope that this showcase is enjoyed by all whom read it. Thanks so much for reading and please feel free share any comments or critiques. If you find my blog enjoyable, be sure to subscribe to get notifications on future posts. And to my devoted legions of fans: I do apologize for taking longer than normal to get posts out. Time is not on my side so far this year.