WIP Chinese General, Han Dynasty - 54mm Pegaso

[Oda]

Abso#$*&!@#**lutely fantastic.Thorough and easy to understand yet masterly.This is genious stuff Phil.It makes me want to drop everything I'm doing and go in my stash,take out the general and start painting.This is a thread that deserves to be published.

Oda.

 

[phil_h]

Oda, thanks!! You're words are very encouraging, and totally make it worthwhile to continue on with what has turned out to be a a much more difficult task (but thoroughly enjoyable) than I originally had envisioned!!
Phil

 

[Huw63]

Abso#$*&!@#**lutely fantastic.Thorough and easy to understand yet masterly.This is genious stuff Phil.It makes me want to drop everything I'm doing and go in my stash... This is a thread that deserves to be published.

Oda.

I'm late with catching up on things but I could not agree more! Lovely stuff.

Cheers

Huw

 

[phil_h]

I'm late with catching up on things but I could not agree more! Lovely stuff.

Cheers

Huw

Huw - Thank you so much for the kind words!

 

[Mike Stevens]

Looking good Phil, I the properties of those metallic's.

 

[Ferris]

Very nice work and enjoyable write-up Phil!
This is going to be a exquisite figure when done.

Cheers,
Adrian

 

[phil_h]

Looking good Phil, I the properties of those metallic's.

Thanks a lot Mike!

Very nice work and enjoyable write-up Phil!
This is going to be a exquisite figure when done.

Cheers,
Adrian

Thanks Adrian - I'm glad you're enjoying it -it's much appreciated!

 

[phil_h]

Hello Everybody!

Today we'll cover some odds and ends - the shin armor, the (rather elaborate) shoes and some white under robes.

With the armor finished, I had to sit and think a little bit about what part of the figure we'd need to paint next. At some point it dawned on me that he's been standing up this whole time (very patiently I might add), and so the least I could do is paint up his legs and feet. I also thought that painting the shoes would be a major pain (mainly due to the fact that I counldn't see at all most of the detail sculpted onto them), so I just wanted to get them over and done with.

So, let's do some white undergarments. These were the colors used:

For this particular figure, I wanted to go for a slightly worn, "weathered" looking white. The white areas are as follows.

• Base color of Titanium White with a tiny speck of Naples Yellow Hue mixed in. This creates a very pale, desaturated ivory color. It's also a slightly "warm" white.
• Shadows where done using the "Shading Gray" in the picture above. This was diluted pretty heavily before applied. You can shadow white in various different ways, but going with a cooler shadow tone helps contrast with the slightly warmer base color. This kind of contrast will help make things look a little more dramatic.
• Highlights where just pure Titanium White.

Here is an area base coated (notice how this looks almost like pure white):

Here is the same area finished off with some shadows and highlights (you can also see the worn/weathered look to it as well). This is much more dramatic looking and appropriate for our General:

And next is the shin armor (you'll also see more of the white areas in all the subsequent photos).
The shin armor is very, very similar to the armor that we did in our last post. The major difference is that instead of metal plates on the sides of the jade inlays and gold gilding, here we have some white enamel plateing. The colors used are the same used in our armor posting, and the white areas were painted using the base coat color (Titanium White, speck of Naples Yellow), used in the whites above. As mentioned in the prior post on the armor, we're using our Carbon Black "eraser" for neatening and tidying up in between all of our steps. (This was especially true on the shoes.) Let's see how this came together
As with the armor, we paint in our jade inlays:

Next we'll paint in the gold areas, while cleaning up the just painted in jade:

In contrast to the golden gilding around the jade, we want to shade and weather the gold bands on his ankles. This was done using a sepia ink (I forgot to take a photo of this), and also the Shading Grey shown in the earlier photo on the whites. This creates a nice contrast in the metals, and breaks up the gilding from the armor bands:

And to finish the shin armor off, here is the last bit with the white - I also (on purpose), painted some thicker black lines around the white sections and the gilding just to give it a little more interest (and again, to make it look more dramatic ):

And... on to the shoes.
Our boy here is wearing some pretty fancy shoes, so let's see what colors we'll need:

To be honest, I couldn't really see any of the detail on the sculpt on his feet, so I was just kinda flying by the seat of my pants here. There was no order I had in mind for each of the following steps. I just kinda "winged" it. (It's also hilarious how small this actually is compared to how huge it looks in the below photos)
Here are the first steps:

Next was the gilding (which was almost entirely free handed):

Here comes the blue section on his heels (this blue color will also be used quite a bit on one of his robes). The blue area is Cerulean Blue mixed with a little bit of Titanium White, and then the highlights are Titanium White with a little bit of Cerulean Blue:

Next is the red sections - even though they're relatively small sections, here are the shades/highlights used:

• Base coat is Naphthol Red Medium mixed with a tiny bit of Chromium Green. Green is the complimentary color to Red, so mixing some in will desaturate the color a little bit, and mellow it out some.
• The high lights are a mix of the base coat with more and more Vat Orange (that's an awesome name) mixed in.
• The shadows were done using the Sepia ink that was mentioned earlier.

Let's take a look:

And white tips - no shading, but it's the white base coat as above, with pure Titanium White highlights on the very tips. This step also finishes them off, so lets see the final results:

To wrap up, let's see our General so far with his new shin armor and shoes:

With these areas finished, I think we're starting to see some real progress being made now. I'm already starting to think about what to do for my next project!
Regards,
Phil

 

[phil_h]

Hey guys...

As an addendum to my last post, here is a quick, short post on the hip guards (or whatever they are called). We're going to do them in different shades of blues with gold trim/inlay.


As usual, here are the paints used during the process:

 

[phil_h]

Whoa - I hit the wrong button - here is the rest of what should've been the post above!
These were pretty straight ahead to paint, the only possible difficulties were just getting all the tiny little freehanded lines fairly clean.


Base coat is just plain Cerulean Blue:

For the top of the protector, let's get a darker blue tone to contrast with the lighter blue tone that will be used below. The dark blue tone is Cerulean Blue with a little bit of Carbon Black:

Next, using Carbon Black and Iridescent Gold, let's draw some lines to help further separate the top and bottom parts:

Now, a inlaid circular pattern on them - the pattern is much more visible on the right one than the left one, because the robe is covering quite a bit. I only have a pic of the right one:

Next we'll paint a thin light blue line to separate the top and bottom of the hip protector:

The completed hip guard has gold and light blue trim around the bottom - here it is:

Here are the completed hip guards in the context and here is what our General looks like now:

I hope you like what we have so far!

Regards,
Phil

 

[Oda]

Phil my man,you are creating some serious magig here.I cannot tell you how much I love this.The scale,the choice of colours,the freehand details and above all the detailed and very nice written text.It's an absolute pleasure reading your every new post.Thanks mate.

Oda.

 

[peedee]

Very interesting to read right through from the beginning Phil, the intricacy of the detail would normally swamp the eye or confuse the onlooker.
But on this figure it delineates the seperate components perfectly.

Paul

 

[anstontyke]

a brilliant step by step guide that compliments one hell of a paint job.

tony

 

[phil_h]

Phil my man,you are creating some serious magig here.I cannot tell you how much I love this.The scale,the choice of colours,the freehand details and above all the detailed and very nice written text.It's an absolute pleasure reading your every new post.Thanks mate.

Oda.

Thanks man! Super glad you're still enjoying it! I think we're definitely past the halfway point with our work now!

 

[phil_h]

Very interesting to read right through from the beginning Phil, the intricacy of the detail would normally swamp the eye or confuse the onlooker.
But on this figure it delineates the seperate components perfectly.

Paul

Thanks Paul! It was the fact that this guy has a ludicrous amount of detail and a lot of intricate parts and areas that made me start thinking he'd be the perfect subject for a narrative style step by step. For many beginners out there, a figure like this could be fairly intimidating, and I thought it might be worthwhile to see how somebody might break it all down and approach it all - and hopefully in the process make it much more accessible for tackling these kinds of super detailed, complex figures at this scale.

Regards,
Phil

 

[phil_h]

a brilliant step by step guide that compliments one hell of a paint job.

tony

Thanks man! Much appreciated. Got some robes and freehand patterns coming up - should be interesting!

Regards,
Phil

 

[phil_h]

Hey guys... it's that time again!

I've been away on vacation (or "holiday" as many here call it ), and have not been able to make any progress on our general. Before I left, I started on the freehanding of the General's robe, and I was able to finish it yesterday, so that's what we'll be looking at today.


The Robe
(To keep things simple, we're just going to do a reproduction of the patterns on the box art)

Alright, so on the back of our General's robe, we have 2 different small freehand patterns. One that provides the bottom border of the cloak, and the other takes up the rest. This kind of work can get very complex very quickly if we don't come up with a plan to tackle all this. Freehanding patterns and whatnot can be a very complex topic, and it's also a very subjective one! As mentioned several times throughout this SBS, techniques and approaches that one prefers, may not be what works for others, and vice-versa. With that being said, here is how I decided to approach this rather daunting robe:

To start with, we'll be doing the bottom border pattern first. The other pattern has no real "stop point", so by doing the bottom pattern first, we provide a border and container for our second pattern - once this is in place, we can just fill up the rest of the robe with it. It will also help us with finding some reference points for the second pattern in terms of how the cloth of the robe is laid and oriented.

Here are the paints we will be using for the first pattern:

Before we do anything, we want a nice clean canvas to work with, so as a "Step 0" we give the entire robe a nice clean base coat of our Carbon Black:

Next, before we do any patterns, there is something very important we need to do first. The robe itself, just like anything else we do, needs to be shaded and highlighted - regardless of the fact that it will be entirely covered with a pattern. However, the fact that it will be covered allows us to not worry about having to be so smooth when blending our lights and shadows together! Also, this needs to be subtle, we don't want to over do it here - that will just make much more difficult to paint our pattern.

We'll just use a neutral grey tone to do some highlights - it's really just a way to help us perceive the volumes on the bottom of the robe:

It's may be hard to see in the above photo, but there is now a nice grey band along the raised areas of the bottom of the robe. Notice we did not blend in this in at all at the top border - that will just be painted over when we do our second pattern. (It's always good when you can find an order that will let you be sloppy!)

Now, with that out of the way, we can focus on the pattern itself. The pattern consists of:

• A bottom border
• Top border
• Repetitive "squared" spirals in between the borders.

So, to start, with our Naples Yellow, let's draw a nice line on the bottom of the robe, demarcating our bottom border:

Now that we have that in place, we can start painting in our squared spirals. Let's put our first one in:

I should mention an important thing when doing a repetitive pattern like this, and obvious question is, "where do I start?" For me, the answer is to find a spot on your surface that you can get one entire, complete element of the pattern painted in. Doing this makes it much easier when having to take into accounts things like folds, edges or irregularities in your surface. Once you have the first element in, you can start working the next elements in on either side and repeat from there. As an example of this, here is what the robe looks like after starting from the center and going out to the left side:

And here are the spirals all done:

Another thing to keep in mind is that painting small (in this case ridiculously small), even, neat lines like this takes time and patience. If at any point you think any of your elements, or a part of an element is not quite how you like it, just take your base coat (or shade or highlight color), and "erase" it out and start over again. Sometimes it can be a big giant pain in the ass to redo this kind of stuff, but it's so much worth it in the end, and really, really makes a difference in the final product.
With the spirals done, let's add our top, enclosing border. In addition to the top border, I've also highlighted the parts of the pattern where light would hit that part of the robe. The highlights were done with a mix of Naples Yellow and Titanium White - this is super important and what makes the pattern really come alive (and give it almost a golden non-metallic look to it):

And that's the first one finished! We'll cover the next pattern and finish off the robe in the next post...
Phil

 

[phil_h]

Robe - second pattern

First off, here are the paints used:

Unlike the first pattern, which just consisted of a single "atomic" element, this pattern's main repeating element consists of several smaller repeating sub-elements. What we want to do is break each element into its constituent parts, and figure out the easiest way to paint each one in, one-by-one. (A fancier term for this would be "functional decomposition"). Let's take a look at the breakdown of the elements:

• Orange dots - this to me would be the starting point of the pattern
• Light blue boxes around the orange dots
• Light blue lines connecting the corners of all the boxes above
• Inside the spaces created by the above step, there is a star without the middle.

This is exactly how we'll approach painting this. Before we get on with it, however, we need to basecoat the rest of the robe:

This is a mix of Cerulean Blue, Carbon Black, and a tiny spot of the Vat Orange.


After the basecoating, we need to highlight the robe:

All we did was just take our basecoat mix and add some more Titanium White. Because much of this will be covered up, we don't have to be super smooth with this particular bout of highlighting - we just want to give the eye some hint of how the light is falling on the robe. Also, we want a to be fairly
low contrast - if we have a higher contrast, we'll just wash out the pattern that will sit on top. (That
would be bad ).

Now that we have our groundwork done, lets start on the pattern. First we have some orange dots:

The orange was Vat Orange with a tiny bit of Carbon Black mixed into it. Getting these dots in the right place is important, because everything will be positioned off where they are. I had to erase a re-position a couple of these as I painted them on.

Once the dots are in place, we can then paint some very small light blue boxes around them:

The blue lines are our highlighting mix with more Titanium White added to it. Keep in mind, I had copious amounts of the base coat and highlight tone mixed on my palette, because almost every box I painted I had to tidy up in some fashion!


Now let's connect all the boxes at the corners:

Now we can see how after a few (relatively) simple steps, our pattern is coming together. By breaking it down into easy elements, we're able to get something that looks a lot more involved than it actually is!

Next is to draw a star in each of the spaces we just made by connecting the boxes. The star shape is just a plus sign with an x drawn through it:

Now that the stars are in place, we can hollow out the middles by painting a dot of the basecoat (or highlight mix) into the center of each one:

Lastly, we want to paint a darker border on selected parts of the inside of the star areas. This will help give our pattern a much more "3d" look, and give added depth to the elements:

Finished - here are some more shots of the finished pattern:

Also, in order to see just how small these patterns actually are, here are some full figure images:

Now our General has a very fancy rear. Next we'll tackle the red robe on top.

Phil

 

[DaddyO]

Lorks a lordy Phil that's a fine bit of work and a lovely breakdown of how you did it t'boot.

Keep it up my good man
Paul

 

[anstontyke]

stunning, you really make it look so simple. your tutorial is certainly helping me along.

cheers
tony