20 Minute Purple Robe

Last Late Night Video

This is going to be my last late night video for sure. I’m going to start painting first thing in the morning so I can stop doing this twice.

Testing Speed Paints

I’ve been curious about what “strong purple” actually means. Continuing our speed paint testing with Moody Mauve on this cloak.

The Setup

In case you missed the other video: I brush primed this, dry brushed with a warm white (vanilla white), then came back and sketched in more white at the top of the robes. I wanted to get that worn-in, faded look on this purple.

My Problem as a Painter

I know a problem I have—I try to make my blends too smooth. I put too much into the transition from low to high, so I lose the contrast. There’s not a big enough difference between my shadows and highlights.

Here I’m forcing myself to go from dark to bright and have it be crazy. Learning to accept that’s okay to do.

The Stippling Technique

Instead of dragging edge highlights down, I’m going where I would normally edge highlight and just very gently stippling in, building up a highlight.

I’m using an abused brush with a curved tip—actually works well for this. Starting at the very top, just working down with chunky dots following where my dry brush was.

Going Brighter

I’m taking this highlight way brighter than my brain is telling me to. Almost pure white with a little purple tint. My muscle memory keeps wanting to do subtle highlights, but I’m intentionally going chunky.

Painting for the Tabletop

I’m specifically trying to paint to make this guy look good at tabletop level. At 2-3 feet away, it looks pretty cool. It’ll look terrible if someone picks it up and stares, but that’s the effect I’m going for.

Defeating the Inner Beast

There’s a book called Rational Recovery that helped me way more than AA ever did. It talks about an “inner beast”—the critic always telling you you’re a failure.

I’m doing this to defeat that beast telling me I’m a terrible miniature painter. And also telling me I should go buy a six-pack right now while everyone’s asleep. But that’s probably unique to me.

The Answer Is Always Glaze

If you ever want to make your paint job look better, just glaze it. I can glaze over those highlights and tone it back down—which is exactly what I don’t want to do here, so I’m not going to keep glazing.

20 Minutes Done

Quick one—13 minutes, probably 15 because I had to stop when I threw the model across the room. But hey, not bad. 20 minutes of painting, got the robe done, and I think it looks pretty good.

Also, this is the last video to comment on for the giveaway. I’ll pull the winner tomorrow.