Back in 2015, I started doing a series of very special gifts. Painted miniatures for friends who influenced my hobby a lot:

When I first came to GenCon in 2014, I was lucky to bump into Dave Seley (known as Cervantes in the community) at Infinity booth. He then introduced me to Guillermo Hernandez (going under alias Magno as a warcor and forum member).

This semi-random encounter naturally led to a hangout in a bar later that night. And that hangout changed my hobby life forever.

Long story short — couple of months later, we all met in Spain, at Corvus Belli headquarters. Spent a great week in Galicia, entered the sacred halls where Infinity is created, and even played 2v2 game with CB guys. We won that game, btw...

Apart from influencing my own hobby life, Dave and Guillermo are both long-time Infinity vets and promoters of the game (basically, since the first edition). In other words, they were Warcors long before the term existed.

Corvus Belli respect them so much, that they're mentioned right on the first page of Infinity N3 book (as their fictional characters Magno and Saelig):

So, I wanted to create a hobby gift for each of those two awesome guys.

This were gifts #3 and #4 in the series, meaning I already had some experience. But at the same time, my ambitions have grown, and this project was much more complex than previous ones.

My guidelines were:

• Two separate gifts that would still be somehow connected. The gifts must be self-sufficient and standalone, since the only moment they would be seen together would be the moment I present them. At the same time, I wanted them to be connected in some way.
• Miniatures representing Magno & Saelig. Since Dave and Guillermo already had their own characters in Infinity universe, I wanted to make a vignette with those characters. And I had to find or convert appropriate miniatures.
• Duel vignette. I wanted to put them in a conflict, as a representation of their tabletop rivalry through the years. And also duels are more interesting and dynamic than just a couple of minis standing together on a piece of terrain.

I'll share some insights about development and construction process in the end of this article. But for now, let's go straight to the final result.

According to Infinity fluff, Saelig is a mobster-body of a rogue AI Svengali. There are no details about his appearance in the books, even whether he is human-like or has a robotic body (like Dakini remotes for example).

I decided on human-like appearance but with a cyborg / Terminator twist:

When building a color scheme for Saelig, I opted for a Blue-Yellow-Red triad. At the moment I was still figuring out color theory, and believed in a popular misconception that those colors form a triad relationship. Although I would have done things differently now, he still turned up okay.

If you haven't recognized this model my choice of miniature for a futuristic cyborg-robot-AI was quite counterintuitive: I've used old Ariadna Metro as a base:

I like the look of Metros a lot, and it was a nice opportunity to paint one. I've made some small conversions (slapping a Spitfire on his back, altering his hand and giving him an iPad-like device) which still changed the look dramatically.

Saelig's pose doesn't convey being in combat. He's hacking something or somebody, but he looks relaxed, in control of the situation. To oppose that, and create a dynamic (and somewhat sinister) scene, I came up with this:

Yes, he is an extraordinary hacker, and resides in an advanced synthetic body, and probably feels like he's in control... but in a few seconds that sleeve would be mangled beyond recognition by a monster crawling from the darkness.

The most difficult thing about painting this vignette was lighting. I didn't wanted to end up with boring general lighting, and instead tried to create an impression of a more focused light source.

But for that effect to work, and for a scene to look believable, every illuminated object needs to be painted correctly. With correct brightness and shine to it. Even a little mistake on that part breaks the atmosphere of a scene. You look at it, and realize it just doesn't work.

Let's deconstruct this scene as an example:

I invite you to study this photo for a bit. Where are bright spots? Illuminated surfaces? Shadows? Which surfaces are more reflective and less reflective?

The light source isn't modeled in the vignette, but you still can see it:

The lighting of every single object have to be in coherency with other objects. General highlights and shadows of the scene have to be spread over all objects. Any object that breaks from this "light map" would break the scene.

Note the placement of highlights on Saelig's jacket, on Hungrie's head, on cables and crates. Note the shadow on the floor between his boots. This stuff needs to be done correctly, and tied together.

To complicate my life even more, I also added another lighting zone into this vignette. Which was a challenge, but I'd say the extra effort was totally worth it:

It adds to the ambience, and helps define the lighting even more. You can clearly see that Saelig is standing under a warm light source (like maybe a focused lamp at the ceiling), and that there's a cool light source behind a Hungrie (like a discharge lamp in a lab facility or something like that).

If you're doing more that one light source, make sure all highlights are consistent with light temperature of their source. For example, note the difference between reflections on these canisters:

The one on the left has warm highlights, while the highlights on the other one are cold. These are small details, but it all adds up, and in the end defines whether the scene would be believable or not.

Magno is described as an ex-military smuggler with ties to Black Hand. I imagined him as a very combat-oriented character, probably with some black market combat augmentations.

So I started with (quite rare nowadays) Max Scorpio miniature as a base for conversion. He is stylish, he doesn't look like a soldier from estabilished faction, and has an appearance of a bounty hunter:

To convert him, I used a hand from old Keisotsu model (Keisotsu with Missile Launcher) and added a scratchbuilt elbow blade to it (Deus Ex style). The blade was made from a paper clip filed to a desired shape. Also I gave him Combined Army Spitfire, which was dictated by the scene he is in — as you'll see later.

In regard to colors, my idea was to use red-green contrast, but mute the colors down so he doesn't look like Christmas tree. Again, I was in my early days of studying color theory, and at the time I believed that red and green are complimentary.

He still turned up okay, but I would have done thing differently if I were to redo him now.

The vignette for him was more straightforward: he is badass, he just killed an alien guard, and he is moving through some alien-infested environment:

There's no conflict in the scene itself, so I tried to bring some tension using his pose and ambiance lighting. He emerged victorious from the fight with a Gwailo, but he's in the spotlight (both figuratively and literally), alert and ready for other dangers probably lurking around.

Lighting effects wasn't as crazy as on the previous one. Basically, it's just some focused light source over Magno, and couple of smaller lights on the wall. Again, they are not modeled, but you can clearly imagine them by looking and the vignette.

Still, this simpler scene needed to be done correctly. So I was constantly checking that illumination is just right on every object, according to where my imaginable light sources are.

One of the coolest things about this project was the blood mix I came up with. The blood looks very irregular and patchy, with changing opacity in different parts of drops or pools:

What's especially cool about this, it took very little effort, and all the blood you see in this examples was done the same way, in one layer of the mix. The mix itself is a bit weird. Its first three components are more-or-less obvious, but the fourth one is very counterintuitive:

GW Blood For The Blood God + VMA Hull Red + Vallejo Gloss Varnish + Super Glue

Please, don't use your best brush for this. Don't put it on your wet pallete. Super Glue would kill them both. I've mixed it on a piece of plastic and applied with wooden toothpicks.

— Now let me show you the trick...
— Oh like all this is not enough?
— Just look...
— OK... No way! Can't be! Oh... fuck, it can!

Next comes the most awesome part. These two vignettes were designed to connect into a single diorama. And that dialogue actually happened, when I showed the trick to my friends:

It's quite difficult to create believable lighting with such complex scene. Everything I wrote about managing lighting in a single vignette still applies here, but now there's even more stuff to balance.

At the time of this project, I wasn't as grounded in colors as of today. But still, I had a level of understanding that was enough to balance this piece. So, let me point out some useful tips here, without diving too deep into color theory.

Let's deconstruct the colors of these two models. They look quite differently: You can see shades of green as dominant on Magno miniature, and blue on Saelig.

But if we would actually check their colors, it appears they're not as different as it looks:

Green is the only hue that is not present on both miniatures. They both have red (although in different saturation and brightness), blueish turquoise or blue-grey, yellow and orange (in the form of beige and light browns).

Something to note here is how different two models could look while having very similar palettes.

This is not just a fun fact, but actually a useful way of doing your units, armies, dioramas and such. If you want to paint models differently, you don't necessarily need to use different colors. What you can do is to use the same colors, but make another color dominant, or change their proportion, or change saturation, or change brightness... You got the idea.

When we take this to next level and check the colors of the vignette, here's what we'll see:

There are no new hues, only the colors already present on the models. And that is by no chance a coincidence.

Also, all the colors of the vignette are muted in comparison to the colors of the models. This helps make the models stand out and not be lost in gaudy details around them.

Planning and building this vignette wasn't easy, since I've set myself some unusual guidelines:

• I wanted to put the characters in a duel, but at the same time create a "main viewing angle" that would showcase both Magno & Saelig.
• This had to be a two-part vignette due to the nature of these gifts.
• Both parts of the vignette need to be attachable-detachable (and at the time I haven't yet discovered the magic of magnets)

Usually, duel vignettes are built in a way that characters are facing each other. And to observe them both in detail, the viewer needs to rotate the vignette (or settle with a side view). I wanted to avoid that.

After some sketching and a lot of brainstorming ideas with my wife, I realized that it is indeed achievable. And we just need to put the characters not face-to-face, but one character prowling on another. That's how the initial test build came out:

I normally do such mock-ups before building something complex. It helps immesureably to understand whether the design is working or not, to test the composition of the pieces. And as you can see, the composition hasn't changed at all, there were just some details that I've added when building the final vignette.

Then I built all the pieces (including slightly converted Hungry and Gwailo), using a bunch of different materials salvaged from all corners of my hobby room. The crates you see here are casts from Antenocitis Workshop, and other terrain pieces are scratchbuilt:

I prepped all pieces to be painted separately:

One thing to note here: although it is easier to paint all pieces separately, it's much harder to balance lighting this way. When all the pieces of a vignette are fixed, you immediately see whether your "light map" works or not. When all pieces are separate, you have to rely on your imagination and construct the image in your mind.

If you would do something of similar complexity, and paint all the pieces separately, I do recommend at least one final check before gluing. Assemble everything, set on Blue-Tac if needed, and check if your lighting is correct.

This last bit I wanted to share has nothing to do with building dioramas or miniature painting. But I still want to talk about this briefly, to — maybe — inspire some of you to try something similar.

To make these gifts even more special, I write a story, design a few cards, and print that to accompany the model and the vignette. And then pack it into a gift box with custom cutouts for the vignette, model and cards:

And I encourage you to try something like that. It's a great reason to take your brush and paint a thing.

There's a lot of freedom to choose what you want to paint. You're not painting something you need for your own army, nor doing a commission. It's a great excuse to paint the mini you always wanted to paint, but otherwise had no reason to (this was exactly the case with Ariadna Metro miniature that I used for Saelig).

And of course it's genuine fun to paint something as a gift for a friend. It creates an awesome experience for both of you, and a lasting memories to savor.

This vignette wasn't exactly a speedpaint, but speedpainting experience helped me to pack everything into just 69 hours, spread over two weeks. This includes:

• 9 hours miniatures assembly and conversion
• 13 hours vignette construction
• 35 hours painting
• 7 hours story cards (writing + design + printing)
• 5 hours custom gift boxes

As you see, there's only 35 hours of actual painting spent on 4 miniatures (Saelig, Magno, Hungrie and Gwailo) and 2 vignettes. To simplify, let's count 1 vignette as 1 miniature. That results in ~6 hours per piece (miniature or vignette).

I've used a lot of concepts described in the LazyPainter Method (like the PSR Formula, for obvious reasons) Here's the Method PDF if you haven't read it before:

This project was an immense learning opportunity for me, and I hope this detailed analysis gave you some useful tips. I've poured A LOT of stuff into this single article, so let me briefly recap my main findings:

• Vignette / duel vignette construction. I tried new ways of building vignettes, tried some new materials for scratchbuilding, and found an unusual composition for a duel vignette.
• Color management through multiple miniatures and a vignette. I've played with color schemes, tested triadic and complementary schemes based on Itten color wheel (which is wrong and outdated), and learned a lot about balancing this amount of colors in a complex project.
• Blood effects. I've came up with a new blood mix, which is superior to anything I used before.
• Lighting effects. I've tested some slightly crazy lighting effects, and pushed myself to pull out this (quite complex) scene.
• Family brainstorming. This is the main thing, of course. Not the first time I was discussing hobby projects with my wife, but this time it was absolutely crucial. I don't think I'd come up with "one character prowling on another" composition myself. So that's our family secret you now know.