PAINTING EYES: Recently the disscussion of how to paint eyes effectively came up on one of the Coolminiornot threads, so I thought I'd share my thoughts on this.   Painting eyes can be a bind, but I've developed this method which works for me. You can try it and see if it's any good for you. First off, I prime my figures black so I am at an advantage. With a 000 brush I paint in the sockets of the eye with Skull White or Vallejo Ivory. Any over paint or slips I touch up with Black. After having washed my 000 brush I take a tiny amount of black paint and on the eye nearest to my painting hand draw a vertical line. Then I turn the mini upside down and do the same to the other eye. It sounds complex but it is easier to do than to describe. In essence it's about reducing the amount of movement the painting hand has to do in order to paint fine detail. Once you feel comfortable with doing this, you can change from black to using a colour for the iris. Shadow Grey looks pretty good for blue eyes.

Photographing Pewter: I've just been taking some photographs of a Work in progress and thought that I would share, what I have found to be a good method. I took the picture using the Single light source method described by Honza in Coolminiornot's articles section. The backdrop is a large sheet of dark grey artists paper. I set the camera up and adjusted the exposure to underexpose by a full stop. I took the pictures and in Photoshop adjusted the brightness by  -12. Cropped the picture and then saved it. The results can be seen in Reverse Alchemy.