WIP Camel Mounted Touareg Warrior - 75mm

[phil_h]

Hi Phil hope you are fully recovered now-I've been watching this develop and felt that the Camel was too white and lacking detail. I think adding the fur has made all the difference it has also made it less stark and so much more realistic. Thanks for taking the time with the SBS I'm sure the introduction to pinning and filling will have been very instructional for newer members of the forum.

Thanks again and congratulations on the finished result.......Keith

Thanks Keith - your feedback is very much appreciated (and encouraging). I pretty much felt the way you did - the camel was just lacking something, and I'm very glad I put in the extra time to get the fur on there. In addition, as part of the final touches, both the camel and rider will receive a generous dose of various pigments to simulate a weathered, dusty ride through the desert. I hope this will just add to the visual interest as well.

Regards,
Phil

 

[phil_h]

Hi Phil
Sorry to hear about your back and hope everything heals properly.
The camel looks great with the fur added and makes it really stand out.
All the best.
Ralph.

Thanks very much Ralph; I'm glad you like how it's turning out.

Regards,
Phil

 

[phil_h]

Looking good Phil.
Hope your well on the mend.

Thank you housecarl! Hopefully with the back feeling much better, this will all be wrapped up soon!

Regards,
Phil

 

[phil_h]

Phil

Sorry about your back glad you are on the mend

Just read this thread all the way through ...excellent words and details and a great result looms from across the sand dunes

Thank you got sharing

Nap

Thanks a lot Nap. It's nice to hear your enjoying all the words, in addition to the figure - it's very encouraging!

Regards,
Phil

 

[phil_h]

Hi Phil,I still follow this SBS with great interest.
I hope, you are well again!
The idea to paint the fur is great and very well done by you. Congrats.
Now i wait for your base....

Christian

Hello Christian - thank you very much! I'm glad you enjoy the fur! The first part of the base will be posted tomorrow...

Regards,
Phil

 

[Wings5797]

Mate, pleased to hear you are on the mend.
Lessons learnt; Less holidays more painting.
The figures are coming together very nicely indeed.
I really like the camel hair effect, so convincing.
Good work throughout
Keith

 

[rossbach]

Cool! Don't see this often

How did you do the hair effect on the camel?

 

[smudger1960]

youre making excellent progress phil on a difficult subject

 

[Metal Extremo]

Very impressive, and very fast.

 

[phil_h]

Mate, pleased to hear you are on the mend.
Lessons learnt; Less holidays more painting.
The figures are coming together very nicely indeed.
I really like the camel hair effect, so convincing.
Good work throughout
Keith

Thank you very much Keith! And yes, this was quite the lesson learned

 

[phil_h]

Cool! Don't see this often

How did you do the hair effect on the camel?

Thanks a lot rossbach - Since many have asked about the fur, I'll be answering that in my next proper posting (although now I wish I took enough pics of the process for a SBS on it, because I don't think I'll ever paint another mount large enough for it to work)

Regards,
Phil

 

[phil_h]

youre making excellent progress phil on a difficult subject

Thanks so much Brian - it's appreciated!

Regards,
Phil

 

[phil_h]

Very impressive, and very fast.

Thanks buddy! To be honest though, I feel like it's taking forever - it's hard to stop myself from trying to rush through it at this point...

Regards,
Phil

 

[phil_h]

Hello Everybody...

Since I've been asked about this several times, I thought I'd say a few words about how I went about painting the fur.

Here is how I did the fur:

1. Since for me, painting the fur is much easier painting a light color against a dark color and the camel is already quite a light in the value scale, I needed to shift the entire camel's color range to a darker shade. This was done by mixing highly diluted glaze of the a color that was slightly darker than the mid-tone - a light shadow color. I then applied that color all over the entire camel in a very rough fashion; I deliberately wanted this to cover in an uneven fashion. This will provide more texture and color variation for the fur. Some areas received more passes of this glaze than others too.
2. Once the entire camel was darkened, I then mixed a ton of a shade a little higher than the mid-tone. With plenty of this mixed up (and it shouldn't be too diluted - if it's too diluted the whole thing will turn into a disaster), I then took a medium/smallish brush (it was a Raphael 8404 size 0), and with just point of the brush, I started painting very small sized lines.
3. The lines were painted in, one section at a time. First the neck, then shoulders front legs, then the belly etc... The important thing is to make sure they're all going in the right direction, and that they are not all uniform in length and width - you want as much slight variation as possible (if that even makes sense ). Also some overlap is good too. The area of the camel you're painting will determine what orientation you should paint the lines with. Also, if a line was too thick, I just painted another line in the mid-tone color on top of it to narrow it down.
4. After the initial (and rather time consuming) first pass, I then mixed a lighter color (a true high light color), and then made another pass of lines over the areas that would normally be highlighted. This still keeps the fur texture, but also enables shadows and highlights too.
5. Lastly, in areas that where too bright, or close to the shadow areas, I used the original glaze to bring down the brightness a little bit.

The entire process is one of "do a little bit of painting lines, and then stop and check". I had an idea in my head exactly what I wanted this to look like, so I knew what I was going toward. I would just start one section, and keep working it until it matched what I had in my head. (This actually turned out to be an oddly relaxing process...)
I hope this helps!

 

[phil_h]

Ok, with the fur out of the way, we can get to the base.

The first thing we need is a base that will be the appropriate size - we'll need something pretty big to stick this guy in the middle of a desert oasis. I settled on a size of 16cm x 28cm -it's a pretty hefty size. This is a beautiful piece wood. It was sourced from Hydra Models, and it's a very high quality hardwood plinth. Here it is before being attacked (and I mean attacked in the most literal sense ).

In addition to having the actual base, it also helps to have a plan regarding what you actually want to do. As mentioned in my very first post, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do, so I mapped this all out onto the base to see how it would look:

I have all the areas for the trees, water, and the actual figure's base all marked out ahead of time so I know where everything will belong and don't have to figure it all out as I go. Of course, this could all change, but it's important to have some kind of plan when starting out - regardless of whether you stick to it . In addition to the trees and water, there will be a lot of grasses and plants along the water's edge. There will also be used/discarded water jugs placed in strategic locations to give the entire scene a more "lived-in" feel.


By far the absolutely most violent thing we can do to this thing is hack out the water bed, so it makes sense to do that first. There are a million ways you can do this, but I happen to have a massive Dremel tool that was just waiting for this kind of job. It's the bigger brother of the Dremel I used to drill out the pin holes in the camel in the very first post. (It's actually the largest one they make). Here is a picture showing this innocent plinth being slaughtered:

Despite this photo being out of focus, I think you get whats going on here. I am taking a rather large hand held power tool and cutting into a fairly hard piece of wood. An important question you may ask yourself is, "why is he doing this in his home office, right on top of his computer???" Unfortunately, that question will have to remain unanswered...


Here is the water bed fully carved out:

Aside from showing the completely cut water bed, the above photo is notable for showing what a complete and utter mess I made out of a rather nice room. Again, you may ask yourself, "why is he doing this in his home office, right on top of his computer???" And again, it's just best to leave this unanswered .

(Continued in the next post)

 

[phil_h]

Here is the waterbed all finished and sanded down:

With that out of the way, the next thing was to secure the figure's base to the plinth. This was done using drilled in wood screws and two part epoxy glue. The wood screws will just about guarantee that whatever this thing is glued onto the plinth with, it won't budge. Plus, it's not often you get to actually screw your base into a plinth, so I couldn't resist. Here is a pic:

I purposely left a small gap between the pieces to get more epoxy glue in there (of course, I dry fitted the figure to make sure it all fit properly too).

The last thing we'll do for the time being is seal the water bed with some air dry sculpting clay. We'll be using this:

This stuff is great, and I'm sure many of you are familiar with it. (We'll also be using this to help make our palm trees.) I cut out a rather large chunk, and then flatted it out. I did this on top of a piece of aluminum foil (along with some talcum powder) so the clay wouldn't stick to anything. I then covered the waterbed in a very generous portion of white glue, and then finally, put the clay on top. While it was drying, I shaped it how I wanted it, and cut the edges to make a proper fit of it.

Here is the final result so far:

I hope you've all been enjoying everything so far!
Next up will be the trees.

Regards,
Phil

 

[Ferris]

Cool! Love this phase in modelling where it is not about the sharpness of a 000 brush, but more about the guts to deploy heavy artillery!

If I'm not allowed to ask why TFH you did this kind of stuff in the place you did it, may I ask how long it took to clean up the mess?

Cheers
Adrian

 

[phil_h]

Cool! Love this phase in modelling where it is not about the sharpness of a 000 brush, but more about the guts to deploy heavy artillery!

If I'm not allowed to ask why TFH you did this kind of stuff in the place you did it, may I ask how long it took to clean up the mess?

Cheers
Adrian

Thanks Adrian. Oh yeah, nothing like the heavy artillery! And, sure you can ask! I would say it probably took me a couple of hours to clean up all the sawdust and wood chips - lots of vacuuming and dusting! Let's just say I learned my lesson, and will no longer be using that room for these kinds of activities

Regards,
Phil

 

[Oda]

Now THAT'S a massive Dremel alright and your computer will never be the same again having become completely disillusioned with you and your priorities in life but other than that this is an extremely interesting and pleasing SBS and I will follow with great care and attention.

Oda.

 

[phil_h]

Hello Everybody...

Well, it's been almost exactly a month since I've last posted. It turns out my back injury was far more serious than I thought, and it really, really screwed me up. One unfortunate side effect of having to put my life on hold for the last 4 weeks was missing the MFCA show - I was planning on showing some of my more recent projects and whatnot there. Additionally, it really threw off my current painting projects. It was only during this last week that I could start working again, and maybe no more for an hour a day before I started experiencing pain again. Sigh...

Despite the above, I wanted to give you guys a quick update on where we're at since I left off. I had planned to do a fairly involved oasis scene, and an accompanying SBS of the whole process, but in my current state it was just way too much for me to do, so I had to jettison all the SBS stuff - it was just too difficult to stop and take pics every 5 minutes to document all that I was doing.

I am happy to say though that the entire project is just about finished. Here are some pics:

Here you can see the scratch built palm tree (a true pain in the ass to build and construct at this scale), the rider, the oasis bed, some vegetation and so on. I had planned on doing more trees, but it turned out that to make them the proper scale required them to be larger than I thought, and there was only really room for one.

Here is a closer look at the oasis bed and vegetation surrounding it:

I really wanted to contrast the dry arid side of the base from where the rider was coming from, to the lush oasis side of the base where the rider was going to.


This morning, I poured the first layer of resin in the oasis to build up the water:

I'll need to do about 3 layers of resin in total, and then the surface work (currents, ripples). In addition, the entire thing is going to get a round of various dry pigments for further weathering and harmony.

Despite the fact that I'm happy with how things are turning out, I'm really ready to move on

As always if there are any questions about any of the above work, I'm always happy to answer.

Thanks!
Phil