Vampire Lady

A reminder you should never rush to fill in an entry form

When I painted this model I had never entered a competition before, but I was a pretty active member on r/minipainting. If you’re not, they run competitions every so often with guest judges and members of the community, it’s all good fun and quite popular. For my attempt I painted “The Duchess” by Miniac.

I had an idea of how I wanted to approach the dress, a stark black/red floral patter, so I gathered some references.

Eventually I came across this pattern and thought “Yeah, sure, that’s replicable at 75mm scale”. I’m nothing if not ambitious.

I started by blocking out the main shapes of the flowers, working from top to bottom on the left side, then left to right around the whole dress. This helped work out all of the spacing before moving on to details.

Detailing was a case of adding highlights and shadows within the red, the beauty of this design is that the mistakes were easy to fix as I could just go over with black. After highlights/shadows, I went through with a fine tip brush and painted in all the lines to break up the large shapes.

Above: The final shots I used to enter into the reddit competition. I didn’t win anything, but they do still use her as an example for the advanced category, so that’s nice.

Below: Reshot the model on a black background a couple of years later.

That wasn’t the end of her competition days though. I did some more work on her, cleaning up parts, adding some contrast, and removing her from the base and putting her on a plain plinth. The base was not a focus for the model, and it was bright enough to be distracting, so a plain base allows the part of the model that should shine to take focus.

Along came Salute 51, I took 7 models along with me in the end, which is a lot of entry forms to fill in. I wasn’t that organised though and had no working printer, so my good friend Nick (nicholost_in_paint) was a responsible dad and printed off a load of forms for me. I had to fill them all in in the line while leaning on another good friends (Ollie) back. By the time I got to form 7 I was bored, but that just happened to be the form for the Duchess. One of the fields said “Give a brief description so we can find it in the cabinets” – straight forward enough right? I just wrote “Vampire Lady” – short but descriptive.

Well, it turns out when you win a silver medal for a model they use whatever you wrote in that box as the title when announcing, on social posts, and print it in magazines. She’s forever “Vampire Lady” because of my impatient ass. I have a Salute Silver medal though, so I can’t complain that much.

For sure a highlight of my painting career, the support from my friends Jade and Ollie made it so exciting, enough to get over the anxiety of collecting the medal in front of a crowd. Look at my giddy little face there.

She wasn’t done yet though, one last outing to the Fen Model Show and bringing home a bronze medal before she’s retired to the cabinet to make room for the next one.