Hello Everybody...
So the bad news is that I was going to do a full SBS on the saddle and whatnot, but unfortunately earlier today I accidentally deleted all the photos except of one - here it is:
This was taken right before I was going to do the backrest (the little chair), and the quiver full of javelins. Despite the missing pics, I'll do my best to write up what's going on. Also, I will go into some detail on the javelin quiver, because I did that after I deleted the other pics... so hopefully not all is lost
First, from above we can see a few additions to our palette. That's these two guys:
The saddle was base coated with a mix of Vat Orange and a little bit of Naphthol Red Medium. It was shaded by adding various degrees of Burnt Umber, and highlighted by adding a very small amount of Naples Yellow. The highlights are subtle; I wanted to give a softer look to the cloth covering the saddle. In addition to the saddle, there is the cloth underneath it. This was painted with alternating stripes between Phthalo Blue and a mix of Naples Yellow and Titanium White. Lastly, there is the harness and tassels which were base coated black, and then highlighted with Phthalo Blue, and then increasing highlights of Phthalo Blue mixed with Titanium White. Again as with the saddle, the highlights are kept to a fairly low contrast level.
That covers all the parts that are missing photos and brings us to the current detail - the javelin quiver (I'm sure there is a far more correct name for this.) Being that today is just not my day though, some of the pics are also a little out of focus. Anyway...
Here is the quiver primed up and ready for paint:
The first thing we're going to paint are the shafts of the javelins - they'll be wooden. When painting wood textures where it's too small to paint a grain texture or something similar, I still think it's important to create some kind of visual interest. In this case we'll do this by wet-blending some different earthy tones onto the shafts, and then blending in some inks.
Here are the shafts with Naples Yellow, Burnt Umber, and Vat orange all blended together in random combinations:
Despite the fact that this picture is pretty blurry, the one thing I wanted to show was the fairly bright color of the wood. By keeping things brighter initially, when we cover this work with the inks, we'll still see a lot of the color variation shine through, and after the inks are added, the overall look will not be too dark where everything gets lost. Speaking of inks - here are the inks used:
These are 100% acrylic inks from Liquitex. I saw them in the store the other day and decided to give them a shot (My overwhelming preference for inks has been Winsor & Newton, but I figured why not try something new?) Here are the javelins with some of the Transparent Burnt Sienna ink layed on in various different dilutions.:
I finished off the Javelins by painting some metallic silver on the tips, and then giving them a wash of the Transparent Burnt Umber ink. After the javelins, came the quiver itself. I also decided to go for a wooden quiver; however, again, for visual interest, I decided that it was going to be a very scratched up quiver. The quiver was base coated in a very similar fashion to the javelin shafts - wet blending Burnt Umber, Naples Yellow, and Vat Orange (and again keeping things a little brighter because of the inks that we'll use again). Here's what this looks like:
To add the scratches, we'll freehand some very little black lines:
And now that the scratches are on, we'll highlight them with Titanium White:
Despite the fact that the white is fairly stark, once we use the inks, everything will settle down:
Just to give a different tonal variation between the quiver and the javelins, this is just a slight covering of pretty diluted Transparent Burnt Umber ink. Not shown is the top rim highlighted with a little bit of Naples Yellow.
Below are some pics of the final results attached to the camel:
One thing I'll comment on is that with the exception of the red/orange colors, every other color has also been used to paint the camels fur. By limiting the palette to these tones I think we have a pretty decent harmony of color so far.
Now we can finally start on the Rider!
Thanks for reading,
Phil
