phil_h
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WIP Chinese General, Han Dynasty - 54mm Pegaso
- Thread starter phil_h
- Start date
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tonydawe
A Fixture
Hi Phil,
Thanks for the SBS mate. It's always educational to see how another artist approaches his subject. Just one observation about the shape and focus of the eyes. It may just be a trick of the camera but in looking at the photos I think the right hand eyeball isn't looking in the same direction as the left eye and isn't the same shape. Apologies if I'm wrong, but if I'm not, now is the time to do something about it. Once you've done the face, the last thing you want to be doing is touch ups on the eyes.
Thanks for the SBS mate. It's always educational to see how another artist approaches his subject. Just one observation about the shape and focus of the eyes. It may just be a trick of the camera but in looking at the photos I think the right hand eyeball isn't looking in the same direction as the left eye and isn't the same shape. Apologies if I'm wrong, but if I'm not, now is the time to do something about it. Once you've done the face, the last thing you want to be doing is touch ups on the eyes.
phil_h
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Yeah, Tony - I couldn't agree more. One of the reason I used to lurk here, and then eventually joined, was just this - I love hearing other painters talk about and offer insights into their approach. There is almost always something I can take away or incorporate into my painting.
Re: Eyeballs - When I read your comment this morning, I though to myself, "it's most definitely a trick of the camera", and then proceeded to stare at The General's face/eyes for almost 20 minutes straight! I had planned on doing some touch ups around the eyes, but not the eyeballs themselves. After looking long enough though, sure enough, you were spot on man! It was very subtle, but there was something just a off about them, so I spent some time this morning re-doing them. I changed the orientation, and shape, and I think they're squared away now. They are much more inline to what I' trying to work towards, and now make the face even better overall. Thanks for the feedback
. Here are some new shots (forgive the crappy photos - the lighting is making a glare on the highlights):
Regards,
Phil
phil_h
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Very nice figure. Intersting step by step report
Thanks rossbach, glad to hear you find it interesting!
Regards,
Phil
phil_h
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Hello everybody - time for the next installment...
I would like to preface by saying though (and I think this is important, especially for beginners)... This is just "A" way to paint a face not "THE" way to paint a face! Everybody goes about doing this kind of thing in their own way, and everybody has their own technique/approach/medium preferences. This is not the approach I take to painting every face I'll need to (or have had to) paint. It's one of many approaches, and no better or worse than any other I've come across. At the end of the day, what matters is doing what works for you and that you are happy with your results.
Having said that, the approach I've taken to painting The General's face was deliberately chosen because I personally feel for beginners painting a 54mm face in acrylics and for the purposes of this SBS, it's a relative easy way to approach it (and very fast too). It's also easy to explain and show what is going on. It also works nicely on larger figures and busts too.
The face - Initial highlights/shadows
Well, we got our face basecoated, our eyes painted (or as is now the case repainted!), and our palette ready with all the colors/tones we need - we can finally pick up our brushes and start painting!!
Well...not just yet.
Before we start just painting up our General, we may want to give a thought or two to "The Light Situation." This is a very important question because it will determine where we place all our highlights and shadows on our face (and the figure in general). In order to keep things simple for us, we're going to use a zenithal lighting approach. (No need to rock the boat with directional lighting schemes, OSL stuff or any other fancy effects). Keeping our lighting scheme in mind - we can now actually get on with it...
Our approach will basically be very straight ahead - we will paint in the highlights, then the shadows, then blend them together, and then concern ourselves with details (mouth area, mustache, wrinkles, etc...). We'll also do the hair at that point, and then we can look for anything necessary clean up work and whatnot...
Ok, so let's paint some highlights. Here is what we want to do:
Pretty ugly, right? However, in all of about 30 seconds, we've blocked in our highlights for the forehead, upper cheekbones, nose, chin, and sides of the cheeks, etc - all the areas where light would naturally fall onto our face. Hopefully you can also see what I mean when I mentioned that we want the highlight sketches to be a larger than where the actual highlight would fall (you can see this on the upper cheekbone highlights). It's almost impossible to mess this up, but if you feel the need, you can always use the basetone to clean anything up.
With the highlights blocked in, we can now do the exact same thing for shadows. Here is what we want to do:
. Again, it won't be pretty, but we gotta start somewhere. Here are the shadows blocked in:
Despite the fact that this face looks like something out of a horror film, believe it or not, in about 2 minutes, we've blocked in all of our shadows and highlights, and have a great roadmap for the next step. Actually if you squint, you can see that a lot of it will look fairly natural already. Also notice that there are some places on the face where the basetone has been untouched. Not every part of the face has too have a highlight or shadow.
With that done, we are now setup to smooth all this roughness over, and start blending everything together - which we'll cover in the next post.
Regards,
Phil
I would like to preface by saying though (and I think this is important, especially for beginners)... This is just "A" way to paint a face not "THE" way to paint a face! Everybody goes about doing this kind of thing in their own way, and everybody has their own technique/approach/medium preferences. This is not the approach I take to painting every face I'll need to (or have had to) paint. It's one of many approaches, and no better or worse than any other I've come across. At the end of the day, what matters is doing what works for you and that you are happy with your results.
Having said that, the approach I've taken to painting The General's face was deliberately chosen because I personally feel for beginners painting a 54mm face in acrylics and for the purposes of this SBS, it's a relative easy way to approach it (and very fast too). It's also easy to explain and show what is going on. It also works nicely on larger figures and busts too.
The face - Initial highlights/shadows
Well, we got our face basecoated, our eyes painted (or as is now the case repainted!), and our palette ready with all the colors/tones we need - we can finally pick up our brushes and start painting!!
Well...not just yet.
Before we start just painting up our General, we may want to give a thought or two to "The Light Situation." This is a very important question because it will determine where we place all our highlights and shadows on our face (and the figure in general). In order to keep things simple for us, we're going to use a zenithal lighting approach. (No need to rock the boat with directional lighting schemes, OSL stuff or any other fancy effects). Keeping our lighting scheme in mind - we can now actually get on with it...
Our approach will basically be very straight ahead - we will paint in the highlights, then the shadows, then blend them together, and then concern ourselves with details (mouth area, mustache, wrinkles, etc...). We'll also do the hair at that point, and then we can look for anything necessary clean up work and whatnot...
Ok, so let's paint some highlights. Here is what we want to do:
- Figure out where we want to put them
- Take our highest highlight (in this case highlight 3) and literally just draw it into place with our paintbrush. You may have heard this referred to as "sketching" or 'blocking" in the highlights.
- Make sure the highlights we painted on are done in a fashion where they are a little larger then they would need to be. This makes sure that there will be some overlap between the highlights and shadows - this will help us with our blending and smoothing out.
Pretty ugly, right? However, in all of about 30 seconds, we've blocked in our highlights for the forehead, upper cheekbones, nose, chin, and sides of the cheeks, etc - all the areas where light would naturally fall onto our face. Hopefully you can also see what I mean when I mentioned that we want the highlight sketches to be a larger than where the actual highlight would fall (you can see this on the upper cheekbone highlights). It's almost impossible to mess this up, but if you feel the need, you can always use the basetone to clean anything up.
With the highlights blocked in, we can now do the exact same thing for shadows. Here is what we want to do:
- Figure out where we want to put them
- Take our darkest shadow (in this case it would be shadow 3), and paint it right into place.
- Make sure a little bit of the shadow overlaps the highlight where they would meet.
. Again, it won't be pretty, but we gotta start somewhere. Here are the shadows blocked in:
Despite the fact that this face looks like something out of a horror film, believe it or not, in about 2 minutes, we've blocked in all of our shadows and highlights, and have a great roadmap for the next step. Actually if you squint, you can see that a lot of it will look fairly natural already. Also notice that there are some places on the face where the basetone has been untouched. Not every part of the face has too have a highlight or shadow.
With that done, we are now setup to smooth all this roughness over, and start blending everything together - which we'll cover in the next post.
Regards,
Phil
phil_h
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OK, guys, let's get right into it.
The Face - smoothing/blending
So at some point in between this:
and this:
Something must have been going on. Let's find out what.
In order to smooth down our very rough highlights and shadows, we're going to use what can be referred to as "the classic layering/glazing" technique. Another possible approach would be wet-blending. Also you can combine the two. In general, I think both techniques are important, and each one has situations where it may work better than the other. In my own personal painting (outside of this figure), I almost always use some kind of combination of the two. I would definitely urge beginners to practice and get comfortable doing both.
The idea behind layering and glazing to smooth color transitions is pretty simple. By using relatively diluted paint (and taking advantage of the naturally translucent properties of acrylics), we create a gradient from one color to another by using a series of intermediate tones painted one on top of another. At first it may sound like a laborious process, but with a little upfront planning and some experience, you can actually create fairly smooth blends pretty quickly (minutes). Because we laid out all of our intermediate tones on our palette prior to starting the process, we have all the intermediate tones available to us and ready to go.
From a process standpoint, this is my favorite part. I find the motions of loading the brush, making a stroke here, a stroke there, unloading the brush, and then repeating with another color for the next pass to be very relaxing and rhythmic. You kinda just lose yourself. it's a very different pace from doing something like eyes or other detail work, for example.
A couple of things to keep in mind:
Remember, we're starting here
After a couple of passes (maybe all of 5 seconds) we're here:
You can definitely see the difference at the top and bottom of the cheek between the former and latter pictures. Here is another angle from the same point in the process:
Still very, very rough looking, but with a little imagination, we can see where we're going. Here are the next couple of passes:
As we layer in all the intermediary tones, we can see how our shadows and highlights are smoothing out. Every couple of minutes in the process, I like to take stock in where we're at and see what's going on at a more global level. So for example, at this point (after a couple of more passes from the above), I thought it would be helpful to frame the face by base coating the hair:
Wow - what a difference! The nice thing is that I don't even think this took me 15 minutes.
While we're at it, let's also block in the eyebrows, mustache, and little beard. The reason now is a good time to do all this, is that we're at the point where we can start thinking a little bit more locally about our smoothing/blending work, and start to zone in on specific areas. Having these details base coated helps give us our bearings.
Now we're getting really close. As a matter of fact, for a 54mm, there are many that at this point in the process would just say, "good enough". Let's take a look at how our palette is looking:
In the photo above, it's easy to see how I used the middle of my palette to mix in between tones from the colors sitting in the wells. You can also see how thinned down or diluted some of the in-between highlights and shadows are.
So, lots of progress has been made in a fairly short amount of time. Where not close to being finished yet. Although we now have a soft, smooth transition between all the primary areas of the face, we got a couple of small details we need to attend to (the least of which is smoothing out some more pin-pointed areas - which will be discussed in the next post!
Later!
Phil
The Face - smoothing/blending
So at some point in between this:
and this:
Something must have been going on. Let's find out what.
In order to smooth down our very rough highlights and shadows, we're going to use what can be referred to as "the classic layering/glazing" technique. Another possible approach would be wet-blending. Also you can combine the two. In general, I think both techniques are important, and each one has situations where it may work better than the other. In my own personal painting (outside of this figure), I almost always use some kind of combination of the two. I would definitely urge beginners to practice and get comfortable doing both.
The idea behind layering and glazing to smooth color transitions is pretty simple. By using relatively diluted paint (and taking advantage of the naturally translucent properties of acrylics), we create a gradient from one color to another by using a series of intermediate tones painted one on top of another. At first it may sound like a laborious process, but with a little upfront planning and some experience, you can actually create fairly smooth blends pretty quickly (minutes). Because we laid out all of our intermediate tones on our palette prior to starting the process, we have all the intermediate tones available to us and ready to go.
From a process standpoint, this is my favorite part. I find the motions of loading the brush, making a stroke here, a stroke there, unloading the brush, and then repeating with another color for the next pass to be very relaxing and rhythmic. You kinda just lose yourself. it's a very different pace from doing something like eyes or other detail work, for example.
A couple of things to keep in mind:
- One question often asked is, "How diluted should my paint be???" Unfortunately, the only truthful answer is, "it depends". If your just starting out, I would err on the thinner side - if you need to, you can always just add another layer. As you get more experienced, you'll have a much better feel for what works for you.
- A very important step is after you load your brush up with paint, you want to wipe your brush off on a paper towel, napkin, cloth, whatever. I can't stress how important this is. It's actually even better to do two passes. You want only the smallest amount of paint possible on your brush. Putting highly diluted, watery paint on your brush and not wiping it off, will only cause you to flood your figure with paint. This is Not A Good Thing.
- There is no real science to this. You just go back and forth between the tones on your palette as needed. It is often the case that you'll need to mix an intermediary tone between some of the colors on your palette - go ahead - sometimes you'll find that all you needed was a half or quarter tone to make that final bit of smoothness.
- There is no real pattern in terms of where to start - you just pick a place and go. I also bounce from place to place depending on the color on my brush, whats already dried, and what I think may be needed for any given area.
Remember, we're starting here
After a couple of passes (maybe all of 5 seconds) we're here:
You can definitely see the difference at the top and bottom of the cheek between the former and latter pictures. Here is another angle from the same point in the process:
Still very, very rough looking, but with a little imagination, we can see where we're going. Here are the next couple of passes:
As we layer in all the intermediary tones, we can see how our shadows and highlights are smoothing out. Every couple of minutes in the process, I like to take stock in where we're at and see what's going on at a more global level. So for example, at this point (after a couple of more passes from the above), I thought it would be helpful to frame the face by base coating the hair:
Wow - what a difference! The nice thing is that I don't even think this took me 15 minutes.
While we're at it, let's also block in the eyebrows, mustache, and little beard. The reason now is a good time to do all this, is that we're at the point where we can start thinking a little bit more locally about our smoothing/blending work, and start to zone in on specific areas. Having these details base coated helps give us our bearings.
Now we're getting really close. As a matter of fact, for a 54mm, there are many that at this point in the process would just say, "good enough". Let's take a look at how our palette is looking:
In the photo above, it's easy to see how I used the middle of my palette to mix in between tones from the colors sitting in the wells. You can also see how thinned down or diluted some of the in-between highlights and shadows are.
So, lots of progress has been made in a fairly short amount of time. Where not close to being finished yet. Although we now have a soft, smooth transition between all the primary areas of the face, we got a couple of small details we need to attend to (the least of which is smoothing out some more pin-pointed areas - which will be discussed in the next post!
Later!
Phil
phil_h
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Alrighty - let's clean up the face...
The Face - (Some) Cleanup
We've accomplished quite a bit at this point, so lets see where were at, and what we need to do to finish off the face itself for good.
Right now, we have our highlights and shadows on and smoothed out, the eyes are in, and the hair, mustache, and beard are blocked in. Before we leave the face and move onto the hair, let's take a look at some things that we can clean up a little bit.
Here are some photos taken from the last post:
A.
B.
Based on these two photos, here are some things that immediately call out for some cleaning up (or areas that just generally annoyed me when I looked at them)
In Photo A:
Obviously, I don't have photos for each little thing that needs clean up (and trust me even if I did, I'd spare you guys). However, I do have two photos from similar enough angles that show some clean up work on some of the areas noted in the lists above.
A.
B.
In photo A, the two main things cleaned up at this point are the mouth area, and the shadow under the lower lip. In photo B, we can see that the shadow over his left eye, the area around the bottom of his nose, and the mouth area have been cleaned up. You can see our efforts made a huge difference in the overall quality.
We then repeat the process until (in our minds at least), we've covered all the areas that needed to be cleaned up and retouched. (For example, the highlight under the chin still needs to be smoothed out).
While more general in nature (and not strictly clean up), I thought we could use a little more tonal variation around the bottom of the face and in the deepest shadow areas. There are a lot of ways you can do this, but I had these sitting in front of me on my desk:
I HEAVILY diluted this stuff down, and glazed it over the lower third of his cheeks and chin area. It's very subtle, but I think it makes a difference:
So, that's some cleaning up. While doing the hair and his little hat, other areas of the face were cleaned up as well, but I am not going to explicitly mention anything in those portions of our SBS.
Next we'll do the hair and the hat, and that will finish the "Face" portion, and we'll finally get to paint some fancy armor!
Regards,
Phil
The Face - (Some) Cleanup
We've accomplished quite a bit at this point, so lets see where were at, and what we need to do to finish off the face itself for good.
Right now, we have our highlights and shadows on and smoothed out, the eyes are in, and the hair, mustache, and beard are blocked in. Before we leave the face and move onto the hair, let's take a look at some things that we can clean up a little bit.
Here are some photos taken from the last post:
A.
B.
Based on these two photos, here are some things that immediately call out for some cleaning up (or areas that just generally annoyed me when I looked at them)
In Photo A:
- The entire mouth area needs to be sharpened up and worked on. The lips need to be defined and better delineated. Especially the upper lip.
- The right side of the shadow under his lower lip extends onto the bottom lip, and extends much further out than it should be - it's kind of a mess.
- The highlight on the front of the chin can be smoothed out a little bit more.
- The inner side of the eye on his right side too dark, and the shadow is too large there.
- The inner top of his left upper cheekbone is too rough too, we can do some more smoothing there.
- The hairline at the bottom corner of his right jaw.
- The shadow over his left eye is way too stark, and extends way to far out onto the side of his face.
- Area on the left side of the nose looks a little sloppy.
- Mouth area (as in photo A)
- Upper left cheekbone (as in photo A)
Obviously, I don't have photos for each little thing that needs clean up (and trust me even if I did, I'd spare you guys). However, I do have two photos from similar enough angles that show some clean up work on some of the areas noted in the lists above.
A.
B.
In photo A, the two main things cleaned up at this point are the mouth area, and the shadow under the lower lip. In photo B, we can see that the shadow over his left eye, the area around the bottom of his nose, and the mouth area have been cleaned up. You can see our efforts made a huge difference in the overall quality.
We then repeat the process until (in our minds at least), we've covered all the areas that needed to be cleaned up and retouched. (For example, the highlight under the chin still needs to be smoothed out).
While more general in nature (and not strictly clean up), I thought we could use a little more tonal variation around the bottom of the face and in the deepest shadow areas. There are a lot of ways you can do this, but I had these sitting in front of me on my desk:
I HEAVILY diluted this stuff down, and glazed it over the lower third of his cheeks and chin area. It's very subtle, but I think it makes a difference:
So, that's some cleaning up. While doing the hair and his little hat, other areas of the face were cleaned up as well, but I am not going to explicitly mention anything in those portions of our SBS.
Next we'll do the hair and the hat, and that will finish the "Face" portion, and we'll finally get to paint some fancy armor!
Regards,
Phil
phil_h
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Hello Eveybody...
Time for the final installment for the face in our SBS.
The Face - Hair and Hat
This by far will be the simplest and shortest of the work we've done so far. The hair will be black - or it was black in our General's youth. In order to help give him the aged, weary look we want to give him, he's going to have various shades of grey hair. Some of the darker shades of grey we're putting in are just to give some highlights to our black base color and help bring out some of the volumes in the hair. Some of lighter greys we're using are to actually give him the appearance of getting older and having grey hair.
The Hair
Here are the paints we're using:
The Titanium White and Carbon Black are obviously for the greys we'll be mixing. The Dioxazine Purple is to put some subtle visual interest into our shadows for the hair. As mentioned, it's subtle, but it's a nice effect - we just gotta make sure we don't go overboard. We want to use this sparingly. Also, in contrast to the paints we've been using for the skin, which have a more satin finish, these paints have a completely matte finish that we want for the hair.
Here is what the palette looks like with all of our tones in it:
Black, white, 3 tones of grey, and our purple color. As far as the application goes, it was just a straightforward application of highlighting some of the individual sculpted strands of hair, and then going lighter or darker depending on our lighting scheme. For a little something different, I added a tiny, tiny bit of the purple into the lightest grey, to give me a "dirtier" grey. It'll make the highlights a little less flat than if we just threw some really light grey on there. It'll also creates a cooler tone, which I think will contrast nicely with the warmer reds and golds of the hat he's wearing. (Pics of the hair will be shown below when discussing the hat)
The Hat
For the hat, we want to reproduce the beautiful black, red, and often gilded with gold laquerware that ancient China was known for. Here are the colors we'll be using:
The hat is done in a few simple steps.
First we basecoat it in a semi-gloss black:
Next we put in the gilding on the top half of the hat. Unfortunately, I didn't realize until a little too late that the left top corner was bent a little bit. Oh well. We've also given him a golden hairpin. Here is the gilding and hairpin:
And here are the red laquer bands on the bottom of the hat:
And that's it! Onto some armor!!
Regards,
Phil
P.S.
If you've managed to stick around so far, your company has been much appreciated
Time for the final installment for the face in our SBS.
The Face - Hair and Hat
This by far will be the simplest and shortest of the work we've done so far. The hair will be black - or it was black in our General's youth. In order to help give him the aged, weary look we want to give him, he's going to have various shades of grey hair. Some of the darker shades of grey we're putting in are just to give some highlights to our black base color and help bring out some of the volumes in the hair. Some of lighter greys we're using are to actually give him the appearance of getting older and having grey hair.
The Hair
Here are the paints we're using:
The Titanium White and Carbon Black are obviously for the greys we'll be mixing. The Dioxazine Purple is to put some subtle visual interest into our shadows for the hair. As mentioned, it's subtle, but it's a nice effect - we just gotta make sure we don't go overboard. We want to use this sparingly. Also, in contrast to the paints we've been using for the skin, which have a more satin finish, these paints have a completely matte finish that we want for the hair.
Here is what the palette looks like with all of our tones in it:
Black, white, 3 tones of grey, and our purple color. As far as the application goes, it was just a straightforward application of highlighting some of the individual sculpted strands of hair, and then going lighter or darker depending on our lighting scheme. For a little something different, I added a tiny, tiny bit of the purple into the lightest grey, to give me a "dirtier" grey. It'll make the highlights a little less flat than if we just threw some really light grey on there. It'll also creates a cooler tone, which I think will contrast nicely with the warmer reds and golds of the hat he's wearing. (Pics of the hair will be shown below when discussing the hat)
The Hat
For the hat, we want to reproduce the beautiful black, red, and often gilded with gold laquerware that ancient China was known for. Here are the colors we'll be using:
The hat is done in a few simple steps.
First we basecoat it in a semi-gloss black:
Next we put in the gilding on the top half of the hat. Unfortunately, I didn't realize until a little too late that the left top corner was bent a little bit. Oh well. We've also given him a golden hairpin. Here is the gilding and hairpin:
And here are the red laquer bands on the bottom of the hat:
And that's it! Onto some armor!!
Regards,
Phil
P.S.
If you've managed to stick around so far, your company has been much appreciated
phil_h
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Thanks so much for enjoying, Oda!
Re: paints
The paints used are Golden Acrylics (http://www.goldenpaints.com/), a very high quality artist acrylic paint. Paints are a pretty subjective topic (everybody has their own favorites), but for me, I love them. They manufacture a couple of different lines of paint; the ones used for our General are from their "Soft Body" line and come in nice dropper type bottles (as opposed to their "Heavy Body" line which come in tubes).
I live in a major metropolitan area (Philadelphia), and about 5 minutes away from me is what can only be described as one of the biggest art supply stores on the planet (I'm not kidding...), so I just walk over there and pick them up whenever the need arises. They have an online store that you can order from - here is the page for them: http://www.dickblick.com/products/golden-fluid-acrylics/
They're a very popular paint, I'm sure you could find them either online or a store near you.
Hope that helps!
Phil
phil_h
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Hello everybody...
So before we get to the armor, I'd just like to give a quick update on the face.
I decided to work some more on the face. This is a pretty common situation, when you think your done, but then after a couple of days, you come back and realize it's not quite what you want. In addition to that, the other day, I received some constructive criticism from a friend whose opinion I have the utmost respect for and value tremendously (and trust me, this guy know what he's talking about). Anyway, we both independently arrived at the fact that the different areas of the General's face could use much more contrast. He just wasn't looking as dramatic as I had in mind - I think my original decision to go with a lower contrast/subtler approach just wasn't doing it. Oh well, this happens sometimes.
Fortunately we can always reassess our work, and change directions if we have to- especially if it's apparent that we're not going down the right path.
So with that in mind, I decided to revisit the shadows and cheek areas, and really, really, up the contrast. I broke out the Winsor & Newton Inks (Blue, Violet, and Scarlet), diluted them, and started glazing them into the various facial regions - the red in the mid-cheeks area, and the blue/purple into the bottom third of the face - much more so than I did in the prior posting about that. I also put a little bit more color on his lips.
Here are the final results - The little extra work has made a huge difference, and I think it's a big improvement.
Feel free to give me your own opinions on these (hopefully final) changes. I'm very happy with them, hopefully you all agree!
Regards,
Phil
So before we get to the armor, I'd just like to give a quick update on the face.
I decided to work some more on the face. This is a pretty common situation, when you think your done, but then after a couple of days, you come back and realize it's not quite what you want. In addition to that, the other day, I received some constructive criticism from a friend whose opinion I have the utmost respect for and value tremendously (and trust me, this guy know what he's talking about). Anyway, we both independently arrived at the fact that the different areas of the General's face could use much more contrast. He just wasn't looking as dramatic as I had in mind - I think my original decision to go with a lower contrast/subtler approach just wasn't doing it. Oh well, this happens sometimes.
Fortunately we can always reassess our work, and change directions if we have to- especially if it's apparent that we're not going down the right path.
So with that in mind, I decided to revisit the shadows and cheek areas, and really, really, up the contrast. I broke out the Winsor & Newton Inks (Blue, Violet, and Scarlet), diluted them, and started glazing them into the various facial regions - the red in the mid-cheeks area, and the blue/purple into the bottom third of the face - much more so than I did in the prior posting about that. I also put a little bit more color on his lips.
Here are the final results - The little extra work has made a huge difference, and I think it's a big improvement.
Feel free to give me your own opinions on these (hopefully final) changes. I'm very happy with them, hopefully you all agree!
Regards,
Phil
Ybrossculpts
PlanetFigure Supporter
Hi Phil,
Have just stumbled upon this sbs, this is just fantastic to look at, really appreciate the pics and info.
Regards
Chris.
Sent from my SM-G900I using Tapatalk
Have just stumbled upon this sbs, this is just fantastic to look at, really appreciate the pics and info.
Regards
Chris.
Sent from my SM-G900I using Tapatalk
Joe55
A Fixture
So far looks pretty darn good if you ask me !
Joe
!Joe
phil_h
A Fixture
- Joined
- Apr 22, 2016
- Messages
- 2,665
Thanks Chris! I'm Glad you're enjoying what has quickly turned into a far more epic journey than I originally had in mind!
So far looks pretty darn good if you ask me
Joe
Thanks for the kind words Joe, I'm glad you like him!
Yes sir! I'm on it - I've already started the clothing and armor and I'm going to post more as soon as I'm able!
phil_h
A Fixture
- Joined
- Apr 22, 2016
- Messages
- 2,665
Hey guys - time for our next installment...
Today it's the Armor!
Painting the armor is going to be a vastly different from the face. It's a much more straight ahead affair. We'll be painting the chest, skirt, and thigh pieces.
Here are the paints used:
The little guy on the far right is Winsor and Newton black ink (I have no idea what happened to the label).
An important thing to mention here order of operations. There is a lot of small detail work that needs to be done, and while there is no "right" way to go about it, they may be ways to make it easier for us. Ideally we'd want to paint in an order that allows us to be as sloppy as possible at each step, with the ability to easily clean up as a result of future steps we'll be taking. With that in mind, for this figure, I think it makes sense to work our way from the top down, and work starting from the most recessed areas to the highest sculpted areas on the figure. This way, if we get sloppy on a more recessed area and accidentally get paint on a higher area, when we get to the higher area, the messiness will just be painted over. We'll see examples of this in the pictures.
So starting with the chest armor, let's give it a nice black base coat:
The first thing we need to do is the black band on the top - all we need to do is paint in the gold trim:
So according to our top-down, inside-outside order of operations, the next step will be the jade bands in the middle of the chest:
Chromium Green was mixed with Titanium White to get the jade color we're looking for. To get highlights, we took Titanium White and mixed a little bit of Chromium Green.
A little messy, but that's ok. When we paint in the gold gilding around it, it'll look much cleaner:
Next we are going to mix Carbon Black into the Iridescent Silver to get a very dark steely metallic tone to basecoat the armor plates on the left and right sides of the jade inlays. (This is hard to see in the photos though):
In order to make the armor plates standout and give them some volume, we'll hit the rivets and some of the edges with pure Iridescent Silver:
That does it for the chest. Next is the skirt/midsection piece. This is almost exactly the same as the chest with the exception of the green highlights around the bottom. Here are the armor plates and the gold gilding:
Here is the jade inlay under the gold gilding and the gold rivets put in underneath (if you look closely enough, you can see some highlights in the middle and ends of the jade inlay):
To finish off the midsection armor, we're going to highlight the bottom area going from a dark jade to a light jade green color. With this size, you don't necessarily need to worry about blending the lights and darks smoothly, you can just layer them on one after another - since it's such a small area, they will appear blending together to the naked eye:
Another reason we don't need to be perfect is that a lot of the midsection will be covered up by a rather large cloth element which has not been glued on yet.
Before we get to the legs, here is the palette so far:
Despite the poor lighting, we can see the various jade tones mixed in the middle of the palette, and all the colors we've used and will use for the entirety of the armor. In addition to the jade colors, there is also a large bunch of black in the middle of the palette. This can be referred to as "The Eraser". Painting details this little is not easy. Trying to make sure they are crisp, even, and clean is even more difficult. It's very easy for me to post photos of each step after the fact, but the reality is that there is a ton of back and forth and clean up work (erasing) needed. We're lucky here, because for the armor at least, no matter what the mistake is, there is nothing that we can't clean up with either black or another base color. All it takes is a little patience (which admittedly, can be hard to find sometimes).
Alright, all that's left is the legs. Let's start with the central jade inlays and gold gilding:
Next are the iron plates on either side of the gilding (using the same black/silver mix, and as usual, hard to see in the photo):
And here are the rivets and edges of the plates done with pure Iridescent Silver to help bring them out:
Next is the gold gilding that borders all the iron plates and the jade inlays that border that (the jade is a little hard to see):
Next we dot in the gold rivets:
Next we'll do the jade colored feathering surrounding the leg armor. We're going to do the same exact thing we did for the bottom of the middle section - we're just going to layer on a couple of different jade greens, going from darker to lighter.
Here is the first pass:
And here is the next pass with the highlights:
And the final pass with just some pure white dots of light in selected areas at the tips of some of the feathers (or whatever it is):
And with that, the our armor is complete. In many ways, much, much easier than the face, but due to how small a lot of the details are, proper attention still needs to be paid!
Since I've hit my picture attachment limit, I'll post some overall pics in the next post
Phil
Today it's the Armor!
Painting the armor is going to be a vastly different from the face. It's a much more straight ahead affair. We'll be painting the chest, skirt, and thigh pieces.
Here are the paints used:
The little guy on the far right is Winsor and Newton black ink (I have no idea what happened to the label).
An important thing to mention here order of operations. There is a lot of small detail work that needs to be done, and while there is no "right" way to go about it, they may be ways to make it easier for us. Ideally we'd want to paint in an order that allows us to be as sloppy as possible at each step, with the ability to easily clean up as a result of future steps we'll be taking. With that in mind, for this figure, I think it makes sense to work our way from the top down, and work starting from the most recessed areas to the highest sculpted areas on the figure. This way, if we get sloppy on a more recessed area and accidentally get paint on a higher area, when we get to the higher area, the messiness will just be painted over. We'll see examples of this in the pictures.
So starting with the chest armor, let's give it a nice black base coat:
The first thing we need to do is the black band on the top - all we need to do is paint in the gold trim:
So according to our top-down, inside-outside order of operations, the next step will be the jade bands in the middle of the chest:
Chromium Green was mixed with Titanium White to get the jade color we're looking for. To get highlights, we took Titanium White and mixed a little bit of Chromium Green.
A little messy, but that's ok. When we paint in the gold gilding around it, it'll look much cleaner:
Next we are going to mix Carbon Black into the Iridescent Silver to get a very dark steely metallic tone to basecoat the armor plates on the left and right sides of the jade inlays. (This is hard to see in the photos though):
In order to make the armor plates standout and give them some volume, we'll hit the rivets and some of the edges with pure Iridescent Silver:
That does it for the chest. Next is the skirt/midsection piece. This is almost exactly the same as the chest with the exception of the green highlights around the bottom. Here are the armor plates and the gold gilding:
Here is the jade inlay under the gold gilding and the gold rivets put in underneath (if you look closely enough, you can see some highlights in the middle and ends of the jade inlay):
To finish off the midsection armor, we're going to highlight the bottom area going from a dark jade to a light jade green color. With this size, you don't necessarily need to worry about blending the lights and darks smoothly, you can just layer them on one after another - since it's such a small area, they will appear blending together to the naked eye:
Another reason we don't need to be perfect is that a lot of the midsection will be covered up by a rather large cloth element which has not been glued on yet.
Before we get to the legs, here is the palette so far:
Despite the poor lighting, we can see the various jade tones mixed in the middle of the palette, and all the colors we've used and will use for the entirety of the armor. In addition to the jade colors, there is also a large bunch of black in the middle of the palette. This can be referred to as "The Eraser". Painting details this little is not easy. Trying to make sure they are crisp, even, and clean is even more difficult. It's very easy for me to post photos of each step after the fact, but the reality is that there is a ton of back and forth and clean up work (erasing) needed. We're lucky here, because for the armor at least, no matter what the mistake is, there is nothing that we can't clean up with either black or another base color. All it takes is a little patience (which admittedly, can be hard to find sometimes
).Alright, all that's left is the legs. Let's start with the central jade inlays and gold gilding:
Next are the iron plates on either side of the gilding (using the same black/silver mix, and as usual, hard to see in the photo):
And here are the rivets and edges of the plates done with pure Iridescent Silver to help bring them out:
Next is the gold gilding that borders all the iron plates and the jade inlays that border that (the jade is a little hard to see):
Next we dot in the gold rivets:
Next we'll do the jade colored feathering surrounding the leg armor. We're going to do the same exact thing we did for the bottom of the middle section - we're just going to layer on a couple of different jade greens, going from darker to lighter.
Here is the first pass:
And here is the next pass with the highlights:
And the final pass with just some pure white dots of light in selected areas at the tips of some of the feathers (or whatever it is):
And with that, the our armor is complete. In many ways, much, much easier than the face, but due to how small a lot of the details are, proper attention still needs to be paid!
Since I've hit my picture attachment limit, I'll post some overall pics in the next post
Phil
phil_h
A Fixture
- Joined
- Apr 22, 2016
- Messages
- 2,665
Just a quick update to the last post - after painting the armor, here is what are General looks like so far:
What's nice is that after showing images that have been blown up and zoomed in to a huge degree, these images - which are still much larger than life size - show a little bit just how small some of the armor details are.
Next we'll focus on some clothing and fabrics...
Regards,
Phil
What's nice is that after showing images that have been blown up and zoomed in to a huge degree, these images - which are still much larger than life size - show a little bit just how small some of the armor details are.
Next we'll focus on some clothing and fabrics...
Regards,
Phil
