My hands are nowhere near steady enough for that kind of fine detail, but if you let the paint do the work for you there’s no need for them to be.
Paint all the bits in the colours you want them to be, drybrush a bit of silver onto the bits you want to stand out, cover the whole thing with black thinned down to ink consistency.
Beyond that, there are simple tricks like layering colours. The “metal” bits on those ogres have black underneath, to give them that rough-iron orcish look. If I hadn’t done that, the metal would be much brighter and more suited to an elvish/heroic look.
@Ignatius I make notebooks too- though I go for the Field Notes mode of 3.5" x 5.5" and three staples for binding. A quick corner punch to put a 10mm radius on them and they’re good to go. I like that I can mix and match paper and paper patterns to get a mix I like.
For archiving, I often just chuck digital stuff into some templates I’ve cooked up and have them printed/bound by a POD service (like Lulu, for example). Works pretty ok.
But those stitched bound notebooks look really nice- I’ll have to work on my covers (as they’re nowhere near as lovely looking as those).
I’d like to make a traditional style hardcover notebook to my demanding specs. That’s kind of my immediate goal there.
I got a spiral bound notebook printed through Cafe Press (is that even around anymore?) but ended up not using it for a variety of reasons. Lulu’s perfect bound books I’ve gotten look decent enough to get a notebook made with but even the nicest POD solution is probably going to have woeful paper for the purposes of fountain pen use (which I wasn’t using when I did the spiral bound so that wasn’t a factor).
Indeed- I use the POD only for the physical archiving of digital work- tweets, evernote, scans, etc… The paper quality is ok, but it’s not to the standards of notebook-snob “ok”.
I’d love to learn to do hardbound books, but I need another/new hobby like a hole in the head. And I’m not that into trepanation, so…
I like to use the design to fill in big areas.
?
