Completed Pegaso 90mm Islamic Cavalry

[MalcC]

Great SBS, very informative.

Malc

 

[Briggsy]

Very thorough lesson on painting a horse, I'll have to print it and keep.it on my desk for a while, no.more horses planned for a little while.

Cheers Simon

 

[Steve Ski]

Dang, you act like you've done this before, this looks realy good, Phil. I gotta bookmark this for later, got a few Big Dogs myself, but I'm a chicken and haven't touched em.

Ruck On!

 

[phil_h]

Hello Everybody,

Thanks for the kind comments, guys! I'm glad somebody out there is finding this useful .

For this installment, we're going to paint the horse's blanket. This post will cover everything up to the freehand pattern we'll be painting on it.

Paints and Color Mixes
Let's take a look at the paints we'll be using:


From left to right we have:

• Red Umber (Michael Harding)
• Oxide of Chromium (Michael Harding)
• Naples Yellow (Williamsburg Oils)

2 out of the 3 colors were used for the horse; by continuing to use them in other elements, we'll achieve a nice overall color harmony in the piece.

The mixes are:

• Mid-tone: A lot of Chromium Green with a bunch of Red Umber mixed into it. This will give us a really nice darker, desaturated green tone to start with. (Since red and green are complimentary colors, when you mix them together you'll wind up with a much more desaturated version of the original color). It'll also warm up the green a little bit.
• Shadow-tone: Red Umber with a little bit of Chromium Green mixed into it.
• First highlight: Mid-tone mixed with Naples Yellow. Mix just enough in there to keep the color as bright as you can get it without it turning yellow.
• Second highlight: Naples Yellow with some Chromium Green mixed in. This should look like a very, dirty yellow with a green-ish cast to it.

Here is the palette:


The Blanket
As always, we start out applying a nice even coat of mid-tone, and then wipe any of the excess away.


The nice thing is that since the paint is wet, it makes it really obvious where our shadows/highlights will go.

Like always, we'll block in our shadows, and then blend them out. Here they are blocked in:

If you look at this photo with the prior one, you can see I just added the shadow color to all the areas that were naturally in shadow. Not much thought needed. Also, you can see I missed a shadow that would be just to the right of the main fold in the middle of the blanket. Of course, I realized this right after I took the photo . Let's blend everything in now:

(Aside from the blending, you can see I also put in the missing shadow.)

Moving onto the highlights, let's block those in. Again, the first photo was a great map for knowing where to put them:

And after the blending:



We're also going to increase the contrast in certain areas by giving them a brighter highlight, let's block those in:


And again, after the blending:



After all the highlights were in, I concentrated next on the fringe at the bottom of the blanket. As with the main part of the blanket, I went and base coated everything with the mid-tone:


Instead of painting in shadows, I went directly to putting in the first highlights:



And then in certain places, I added more, brighter highlights:


As I mentioned before, I didn't add any shadows to the fringe. What I did instead was wait for everything to dry, and then add a wash of pure Red Umber over all of the fringe. This provided our shadow.


As we know, working with washes makes a mess, and more often than not gets in places we don't want it to. So, after apply the wash and letting it dry out a bit, I went back and cleaned things up. This mostly meant reapplying our first highlight:



Also, while I was at it, I decided to add some more highlights, and start working on the element in between the fringe and the main part of the blanket (looks like it's supposed to be some kind of embroidery, but I'm not sure...)






And after a little bit more clean up, here are the final shots of everything finished:






There you have it. Next, we're going to wait for all this to dry (and dry thoroughly), and then freehand something on top of all that empty space.

Thanks for reading guys!

Regards,
Phil

 

[Briggsy]

Nice post Phil, I know you are going to freehand a pattern over this once dry. Is that why the shade is so strong a colour to make it more apparent through the pattern. Or have I overstepped the mark asking this?

Cheers Simon

 

[phil_h]

Nice post Phil, I know you are going to freehand a pattern over this once dry. Is that why the shade is so strong a colour to make it more apparent through the pattern. Or have I overstepped the mark asking this?

Cheers Simon

Nope, not overstepped at all . I was actually going to mention this in my post - the shadows are actually not nearly as dark and harsh looking in real life than they are in the photos. I think this is a combination of my lack of skill in photography and the really (ridiculously so) bright studio light I use to paint with.

Here is a pic with more normal lighting (sunlight and normal room lights); you'll see there is much less contrast:


Hopefully that clears things up a little!

 

[Briggsy]

Nope, not overstepped at all . I was actually going to mention this in my post - the shadows are actually not nearly as dark and harsh looking in real life than they are in the photos. I think this is a combination of my lack of skill in photography and the really (ridiculously so) bright studio light I use to paint with.

Here is a pic with more normal lighting (sunlight and normal room lights); you'll see there is much less contrast:
View attachment 498618

Hopefully that clears things up a little!

Cheers Phil and there was me hoping your were going to reveal a trade secret! Like most of us I'm crap with a camera, well my phone, but I have found that low light actually produces a better result, not always of course the law of chance always throws a spanner in every now and then.

Cheers Simon

 

[Nap]

Hi Phil

That was close nearly missed the latest update ...phew!

Again well explained and with good pics on each stage ...the results work really well

I like the green you’ve achieved not overly bright

Thanks for updates

Look forward to seeing more especially the freehand patterns

Have fun at the bench

Nap

 

[phil_h]

Hello Everybody,

In this post, we'll paint the freehand pattern on the horse's blanket. Before we talk about the actual painting, it helps to figure out just what exactly it is we want to paint first. So with that said...

Fortunately, I had a definite idea of what I wanted to paint:

• Since the figure is going to be covering up quite a bit of the blanket, I wanted to just focus on the borders of said blanket.
• I wanted some kind of busy, flowing arabesque pattern, that has hints of Islamic script. Not the actual thing mind you, but something that if you're far away enough, you might not be too sure exactly what you're looking at...
• This was important - I wanted the pattern to be very similar to the colors it's sitting on top of. I very much wanted to this to be monochromatic, and I wanted it to be, again, a little hard to make out. Like, you know something is there, but you're not sure what. It will also contribute to the pattern being a little aged and somewhat faded. This will also help to not distract the eye from the warrior. I don't want to paint something that will take away from the main event. I very much want to go for something on the more subtle side.

Now let's focus on the painting!

Paints/Brushes
As far as the paints go, I used the same paints I did to paint the blanket itself. The mix was Chromium Green with a little bit of Red Umber in it to darken and desaturate it. By keeping the color very close to the original mid-tone, it will make the pattern sitting on top very subtle to see (which is kind of the point ).

The brush used was:



I like this brush for this kind of freehand pattern work for a couple of reasons:

• It has a much longer tip, which makes it much easier to create lines and curves. Since our freehand is going to consist entirely of just lines and curves, it makes sense to use a brush that is made for that kind of thing.
• The tip is also quite sharp.
• It's a cheap synthetic. Again, no need for Kolinsky sables here. (I should mention, I have nothing against Kolinsky sable brushes; I own a ton of them myself... It just turns out that with oils, they're just not as useful. However, with that said, they are very useful for certain kinds of detail work - we just haven't encountered any of that on this project so far.)

Painting the pattern
The best advice I can give here, is literally, just approach things, one step at a time. Which is exactly what we'll do here. The nice thing about patterns is that (more or less) no matter how complex they are, they can usually be broken down into singular, smaller elements that you can build them up from.

The first thing I'm going to do is to draw a border line across the sides and top of the blanket, which will divide it into sections. It also creates a further frame of reference for the rest of the design. Here is the line:


Pretty simple. If you can eyeball everything, great - if not, don't hesitate to paint some guide dots first, or use a template cut from paper or cardboard. Because I'm kind of lazy, I just eyeballed it. I should mention there was also some clean up - in certain places the line was either wider or narrower then it should've been. When that happens, I clean my brush using white spirit, and then using the tip of the brush, chisel the sides of the line into place until it is uniform (or uniform enough ).

I know want to start painting the pattern in-between the border and bottom of the blanket. The first element is very similar to a curly brace knocked over onto its side. It looks like this:


Here's the thing - for this particular pattern, each individual element doesn't need to be perfect. That is because they are going to get buried with all the other stuff that will be painted in. If that was not the case, then I would be paying much closer attention to each individual element, and making sure they were all perfect. (You'll see what I mean soon enough).

The next element was a basic decorative/plant type element painted onto the bottom of the border line and looks like this:



By themselves, these two elements are really not doing much. They're there just to provide the scaffolding for the actual pattern I'll be painting in between them and around them. I think it's best to think of this next element as vines that are just encircling, growing, and curving around everything. There is deliberately no symmetry here - I wanted things to look a little more organic, and to fill in as much of the empty space as possible. It isn't until this element is in place that it starts to look like exactly what I had in mind:





After getting that in place, I decided to paint another border line to off-set this from the next section that will sit on top of it. Here is the next border line in place:



And now we want to paint the border that will delineate the top of the next section we want to paint in, like so:



This is a little narrower than the first section; and just like the first section, we'll be filling up all the empty space as well. I wanted this to be different from the first section, but very similar and related to each other. The first element was painted in:



Again this element isn't anything special - just a curved line, but it will provide the scaffolding for the rest of the pattern which will fill in all the empty space around it. Here is what everything looks like filled in:



That's the second section finished. We'll be painting no more sections, because the rest of the blanket will mostly be covered up by the warrior. However, the last thing we'll do is paint another small border line around everything:





And there it is, our freehand pattern for our blanket! One thing that still needs to be done is that when everything is good and dry, I will be glazing over the shadow area with the original shadow color, to make sure the lighting is consistent between the pattern and the blanket.

Next up will be the saddle and leather leg protectors.

Thanks for stopping by!

Regards,
Phil

 

[Redcap]

Excellent SBS and progress. Lovely work.
Gary

 

[Briggsy]

Really interesting watching someone else work like this and giving a thoroughly detailed explanation. Very good on the freehand how you built it up from small simple elements. Many thanks for this.

Cheers Simon

 

[Steve Ski]

Watching with interest, for sure, keep er rollin.

 

[Luver]

Extremely nice tutorial, thanks for sharing and kudos for the painting work
Luciano

 

[Ferris]

Well-written and entertaining, thanks! Oh, and educational as well!

Adrian

 

[Nap]

Really interesting watching someone else work like this and giving a thoroughly detailed explanation. Very good on the freehand how you built it up from small simple elements. Many thanks for this.

Cheers Simon

Agree there , well explained and a good result ......a very small area to work on

Appreciate your time Phil

Nap

 

[NigelR]

Thanks for sharing. I too recently discovered synthetic rigger brushes and it's good to see how effective they are. Lovely freehand work btw.

 

[phil_h]

Hello Everybody,

Thank you for the comments everybody - they're great motivation!

In this post we'll be covering the saddle - more specifically, the leather protectors hanging from it (not sure what they're technically called).

We're going to paint them as some heavily distressed leather - we've done some smooth blend work, some freehand work, and now lets do some texture work. The rougher texture will contrast nicely with the rather smoother work we've been doing so far.

Paints & Palette
Here are the paints:



From right to left we have:

• Red Umber (Michael Harding)
• Italian Yellow Ochre (Williamsburg)
• Naples Yellow (Williamsburg)
• Transparent Orange Oxide (Schmincke Mussini)
• Transparent Orange (Schmicke Mussini)

Also used was Transparent Brown from Schmincke as well.

Here is everything laid out on our palette:



Left to right, top to bottom we have:

• Red Umber, Yellow Ochre
• Naples Yellow, Transparent Orange
• Red Umber (Again), Transparent Orange Oxide

Again, for those who have been following along, most of these colors should be familiar. We've used both the Red Umber and Naples Yellow for various other elements of the horse that we've painted earlier. By taking advantage of these common color, we make sure all of our elements are rather harmonious and all work well together.

The saddle
As a huge surprise here, we're going to give this element a nice Red Umber basecoat. Let's take a look:


Now that we have our basecoat down, we can start building up our worn, distressed, cracked, and beat-up leather texture. Our figure's legs will be covering up most of these elements, so our focus for the work will be around the edges and bottom.

Our first step will be to stipple on some Yellow Ochre paint around the edges and bottom. Essentially, I took a pretty beat up flat head brush, and just made fairly rapid up and down motions until i got the paint where I wanted it. If you're familiar with it, it's quite similar to the Sponge Technique, and the results are very similar. Here is the first pass:



Since it's a little stark, we want to blend this in but... just a little bit! If you blend it too much, it'll just smooth out, and you'll lose all the texture! We just want to barely fade it into the basecoat. It looks like this:



If you compare this picture with the prior one, you can see what I'm talking about in terms of just blending the color "a little bit". We managed to fade it a little, but we still have captured the texture made by the stippling motion. (This is the kind of thing where if you were using acrylic paint, you'd be glazing over the texture with a basecoat glaze until it's the appropriate softness).

We can now move onto our next layer of texture which is more or less going to be a repeat of the prior step but using the Naples Yellow and in a smaller area. It's applied the same way - a flat brush using stippling motion. This step also greatly increases the contrast:



And blended:




Now that the base texture is in place, we're going to add and enhance it by adding various scratches across the highlighted areas. For our first pass at this, we're going to add lighter scratches using pure Naples Yellow:





Don't worry if some of the scratches are "too big", because just like the prior steps, we're going to soften these up as well. Here they are blended in a little bit:



Now were going to add our second set of scratches this time they'll be with pure Red Umber. By adding in the darker scratches, we'll add a little more depth to our worn leather. Aside from the color, it's the exact same thing as the prior step - with the exception that we're really focusing more on the edges:


And softened up a bit:


That does it for the all the texture work. Oh, one thing I should add here - all this was done wet-in-wet. All the steps above were done while the paint was wet and hasn't dried. However, after the paint has dried...

I still wanted to add some depth and age to our leather. I did this by adding a series of glazes to the element after everything dried. The first glaze was made with the Transparent Orange. Then to knock that down a bit and yet add another layer, I then glazed over that with the Transparent Orange Oxide. Finally I glazed over all of that with pure Transparent Brown Oxide. This took us from the yellow-ish tone in the pictures above to a very, dark, dirty orange/brownish tone:


There are a couple of notes with this last photo:

• In real life, (not my crappy photos), the final color is much more subdued than what you see here. The paint is also wet, which really doesn't help. (I suppose I could've waited another day for it to dry and then posted...)
• You can also see that while waiting for the glazes to dry (about a day for each), I started working on the straps, reins, and bridle (which will be covered in the next post...)

We're almost done this beast (literally)... We just have a couple of elements left to do, and some general clean up work - which will all be covered in the next post...

Thanks for reading!

Regards,
Phil

 

[Briggsy]

Very comprehensive mate, good painting as well, the horse is looking really good. It is interesting seeing the process with oils, I definitely miss painting wet in wet, not really a good idea with acrylics, not impossible but too easy to.mess up.

Cheers Simon

 

[Nap]

Hi Phil

Another great update ...a veritable “lesson in leather”

I’m not a Oily but glazing with them intrigues me .....any tips ?

Will you distress the actual saddle or is this hid beneath the rider?

Purely my thoughts now ....will you push the saddle cloth edge patterns further ?

Thanks for update...enjoyable read

Looking forward to seeing more

Happy benchtime

Nap

 

[clubcat]

An outstanding series of how to's. Very well written and explained with healthy dose of pictures too. Thank you and well done.
Melanie