miniatures |
January 9, 2020
In this post, I am going to show off my initial version of a wood painting technique that I was inspired to try. The origin is from various disciplines and wanted to see how it would work in a mini and crafting setting.

Getting Started

The materials are not really that important. As long as you have a material you enjoy using and have between 3-4 shades of brown paint that can be applied. Like your standard Acrylic paints, then you should be fine.

In my case, I was using XPS Foam which you can pick up at your local home depot or amazon.

Just be sure to use the material you are most comfortable with and don’t break the bank. It is amazing what you can use that is around the house.

I also wanted to apply what I can from this technique to my Treant model I have. So I thought it would be a nice touch. I figured a scene where the Treant was attacking a wood cutting encampment would be fitting. And yes while building this scene all I could think of was the line from Lord of the Rings 

“A wizard should know better!”.

Shades of brown

When choosing the colors its good to have a reference for what you want to use but I recommend having 2 darker brown tones and 2 lighter tone browns.

These are the colors I used for my project, these are just standard acrylic paints and matched the colors for the mini as well.

Base Coating

I enjoy painting minis so I started with the base coat being the third brown shade in the image above. The goal is to not use too light or too dark of a tone originally otherwise the details can get hidden. In this, we want to highlight all the details and make the crevices and knots use the darker shades.

We will want to do the same for our foam/crafting medium. Now we can do this in a couple of ways depending on how you want to do this. either cut out individual boards to show them as if they were cut down and turned into rectangular boards or have a rectangle that you draw in the details as if they are cut out but next to each other. I decided to cut out them as individual rectangles and made a tree trunk.
As stated before your mileage may vary depending on what you want to accomplish. create these however you want for your campaign. This should also work if you wanted to have actual trees in your scene that you wanted to build.

For all crafting mediums remember to add any sealants that are needed. In my case, before adding the base coat of the brown as we did for the miniature I took some Modpodge mixed with the brown we use for base coating and put that on the foam so that it is nice and sealed and the paint doesn’t just get absorbed into the foam.

Washing

This step is actually just for the mini unless you decided to try to carve the knots and lines of a tree on the foam. If you traced knots and cut lines into the wood boards then I would recommend putting a wash on the craft as well. In this case, use a Dark brown wash so that the miniature and crafted piece has those placed darkened as light would not normally appear there.

In my case, I ended up using a dark brown wash for the mini. But I did not carve into the foam so I skipped the wash on the foam.

Drybrushing

Again, like the wash if you did not carve into it then dry brushing will not help, dry brushing as from my last article is all about taking the parts that protrude out and make them stand out as if that is what is being hit by the light the most to show a lighter shade.
 
Take your lightest tone of brown a paper towel and dry off most of the paint and then go over all of the mini and foam (if applicable) until you like the desired effect.
 

Highlighting & Blending

This is really the final part, Using the various colors and a reference image use the dark browns to trace your primary knots, and details of the wood and then use the other shades to blend and highlight pieces that would make sense to show off in the light. The idea is to act like you are replicating how the light would affect this if it was a real object. the image you are able to direct light on the model continuously. How would that look? Well, highlight topmost parts facing a light direction with the lightest brown shade. Then blend out with the darker shades.

Also apply the same idea to the mini, highlight and blend the other brown towns either towards the lighter tone or towards the darker tone. Also, feel free to add additional details to bring it more life. The eyes, mouth, details of growth on the mini. and add whatever extras to the wood as well! Remember this is supposed to be fun!

Thank you for reading my how-to article to the end, if you liked it please share this blog with someone you think would like it! Also, check out my Instagram for my posts and crafts that I do. @FatedDesigns