Hi friends, many thanks for your comments.
Chris, if you don’t mind, let me answer your kind last remark with the deeper explanation that, in my opinion, these matter deserves:
I’ve been told that my pictures are dark before… I think you’re right, they can be considered that way. Perhaps too much “atmospheric” and too little “descriptive”. Let me describe my way of thinking about...
I try to make a subtle but detailed painting on my figures, using lots of different shades of the same colour (around ten different greens are shown on these marines in order to make every figure slightly different than the others), that, after washing, gets even more vague. Most of the times, the tiny differences between similar shades becomes nearly imperceptible at that scale. This is why the figures are so big on the pictures (not many people show their painted 1/72 figures at the size I do
), because at their real size you wouldn’t see this subtleness.
And I try to act in the same way when I shoot them. I always use natural light but never direct Sun. Light bounced from the sky (even better if it is cloudy!), framed to make them directional and not coming from all around, soft but at the same time contrasted if you back or side light the subject (antagonist concepts that need a little bit of practice to master its use). Subject surrounded by black, to make the background deeper and to avoid bounced light from any side except the chosen direction. All in all, a single source of light, soft but well directed from just one direction. Something we can call a dramatic light.
This is why, knowing that this is a good way to give character to the figures and my work but not the best way to show the painting job, I made so many pictures. If you look carefully at the them, you’ll see that everything is shown some way or another: One helmet fully detailed here, a webbing belt there, weapons, canteens, boots… bit by bit you can see how I’ve painted everything but not in just one figure, fully well represented.
But your comments help me to think about, to try to improve, and I’ll try a little bit brighter next time.
Many thanks!