painting buttons

[godfather]

ANy suggestions on how to paint buttons, metal and otherwise, so they look three dimensional?

 

[KeithP]

Having well sculpted buttons in the first place is a big help. :lol:

For metal buttons, I use printers ink primarily. Over a black acrylic base, I will add the printers ink base depending on the effect I am looking for... You can add gold printers ink to raw umber and you can get a "reasonable" brass effect. You can also mix antique gold with regular gold printers ink to reduce the brightness. Or, heck just use the antique gold...

Now, after that is dried, to shadow the metal use one or a combo of the following: raw umber, burnt umber, or brown madder alazarin, and ligthly brush on to as close to the sides of the button as possible. Using a clean brush, brush away from the highest parts of the button. After that is dried, you can highlight with gold printers ink. Adding a touch of silver printers ink to the gold will really enhance the shine on a metal button (or any other metallic part). Again, just the top parts of the button.

For the surrounding cloth, you will want to dark shade around the button and lighter shade the cloth farther away.

Also, worth mentioning, look where the light falls on the button and shade and high accordingly.

Hope that helps. The naval officer in my bench followed this process more or less. This figure had nicely moded buttons...

Keith