Completed Pegaso 90mm Islamic Cavalry
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phil_h
A Fixture
- Joined
- Apr 22, 2016
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Hello Everybody,
Thank you for the comments everybody - and thanks for sticking around
.
Before I get to the topic at hand, Nap had some questions that I'd like to answer...
Alrighty, with that out of the way, we can get down to the business at hand.
This post is essentially a catch all post for the things that I needed to do to finish off the horse. It primarily consists of painting the straps, reins, bridle, etc. all the metallic elements, and finally any necessary black lining, clean up work and tweaks. Unfortunately, I don't have pics of a lot of what went on, but I'll try to describe as best as possible exactly what was done.
Straps, bridle, tack, etc.
These elements were painted with the following paints
They are Red Umber, Cadmium Red Medium and Cadmium Red Vermillion, respectively.
A basecoat mix of Cadmium Red Medium with a small amount of Red Umber mixed into it was created and applied to all of the straps, etc. Certain selected parts were shaded with pure Red Umber. Also in certain areas, Red Umber was applied to just the bottom portion of the straps. After the shading, highlighting was done with pure Cadmium Red Vermillion applied to the areas which would be hit with direct sunlight, and some of the edges of certain elements. This was then left to dry. Once everything was dry, we moved onto the...
Metals
Since most of the metal elements were actually on the straps themselves, it was important that before getting started the prior work was nice and dry. For the metals, the following paints were used
These are White Gold from Mussini (this is basically silver), Iridescent White from Winsor & Newton, and Transparent Brown from Mussini - this was actually not used. What was used and is not in the photo is Ivory Black from Williamsburg oils.
First a dark silver shade was made by mixing the Ivory Black into the White Gold. This was then applied to all the metallic elements on the model. Next a mixture of White Gold and Iridescent White was mixed and applied to all metal areas that needed a highlight - basically the top portion of all the dot elements on the straps, rings and buckles. For the rings, the inside edge of the bottom parts of the ring were highlighted as well. Next we to let this all dry.
Once all the metallic elements were good and dry, a wash of pure Red Umber was created and applied to both the metallic elements, and the straps, bridle, etc. Unlike the glazes discussed at the beginning of the post, the wash was made by adding white spirit to the paint until I got the consistency I wanted. (Remember for glazes, linseed oil is added, not white spirit. This is different from acrylics where you add water to make both )
After the wash was applied which toned down all the highlights on the metals quite a bit, I then went and re-applied all the highlights using just pure White Gold paint.
Final Tweaks and Clean up
After the metallic elements were finished there were three things left to do...
Black lining is very important and necessary, however, I don't think every single element that is touching another element needs to be black lined. Used judiciously, it can make a huge difference in how neat and clean things look. For the horse the elements that I really focused on for this step were
, but it really makes a difference.
Another important thing is that you don't want your lines to be chubby. In my case, when they got to wide, I cleaned my brush off with white spirit and slimmed them down so the lines were nice and thin. This can take a lot of work, but there is no rush, and it's well worth the effort.
With the black lining finished, I then went in for the final clean up. It turned out that over the course of painting the various elements on the horse, my brush accidently touched previously finished areas, so I had dots of the wrong color paint where they didn't belong. (a dot of Red Umber in the middle of the green blanket for example). So all of that needed to be cleaned up.
Finally here is the completed horse (I tried to get some better pics this time)
Now we can focus on the rider, which we'll get started on in my next post.
Thanks for reading!
Regards,
Phil
Thank you for the comments everybody - and thanks for sticking around
.Before I get to the topic at hand, Nap had some questions that I'd like to answer...
- Re: the saddle, almost the entire saddle proper will be covered by the rider, so I won't be doing any other work other than the quick basecoat it got.
- Re: Glazing with oils, in terms of my approach, I take whichever color (or mix) I want to create a glaze with, and keep adding pure linseed oil to the paint until it has the right level of transparency that I want to use. Once I have my glaze, I then apply just enough to the area that I want to glaze. If it turns out I need to glaze over the same area again, I'll wait until dry and then repeat. Since the linseed oil that I use has dryers in it to accelerate the drying process, I only need to wait about a day for things to dry. In the meantime I usually move onto painting other elements.
Alrighty, with that out of the way, we can get down to the business at hand.
This post is essentially a catch all post for the things that I needed to do to finish off the horse. It primarily consists of painting the straps, reins, bridle, etc. all the metallic elements, and finally any necessary black lining, clean up work and tweaks. Unfortunately, I don't have pics of a lot of what went on, but I'll try to describe as best as possible exactly what was done.
Straps, bridle, tack, etc.
These elements were painted with the following paints
They are Red Umber, Cadmium Red Medium and Cadmium Red Vermillion, respectively.
A basecoat mix of Cadmium Red Medium with a small amount of Red Umber mixed into it was created and applied to all of the straps, etc. Certain selected parts were shaded with pure Red Umber. Also in certain areas, Red Umber was applied to just the bottom portion of the straps. After the shading, highlighting was done with pure Cadmium Red Vermillion applied to the areas which would be hit with direct sunlight, and some of the edges of certain elements. This was then left to dry. Once everything was dry, we moved onto the...
Metals
Since most of the metal elements were actually on the straps themselves, it was important that before getting started the prior work was nice and dry. For the metals, the following paints were used
These are White Gold from Mussini (this is basically silver), Iridescent White from Winsor & Newton, and Transparent Brown from Mussini - this was actually not used. What was used and is not in the photo is Ivory Black from Williamsburg oils.
First a dark silver shade was made by mixing the Ivory Black into the White Gold. This was then applied to all the metallic elements on the model. Next a mixture of White Gold and Iridescent White was mixed and applied to all metal areas that needed a highlight - basically the top portion of all the dot elements on the straps, rings and buckles. For the rings, the inside edge of the bottom parts of the ring were highlighted as well. Next we to let this all dry.
Once all the metallic elements were good and dry, a wash of pure Red Umber was created and applied to both the metallic elements, and the straps, bridle, etc. Unlike the glazes discussed at the beginning of the post, the wash was made by adding white spirit to the paint until I got the consistency I wanted. (Remember for glazes, linseed oil is added, not white spirit. This is different from acrylics where you add water to make both
)After the wash was applied which toned down all the highlights on the metals quite a bit, I then went and re-applied all the highlights using just pure White Gold paint.
Final Tweaks and Clean up
After the metallic elements were finished there were three things left to do...
- Re-apply any needed highlights to the leather straps with pure Cadmium Red Vermillion to increase contrast
- Add any needed black lining to the appropriate areas
- Clean up any areas that got paint on them from painting other areas. Also clean up any artifacts from errant brush strokes.
Black lining is very important and necessary, however, I don't think every single element that is touching another element needs to be black lined. Used judiciously, it can make a huge difference in how neat and clean things look. For the horse the elements that I really focused on for this step were
- The border between the round leather pieces underneath the saddle and where they meet the green blanket.
- The areas where straps and buckles met.
- To expand on that last bullet point, any area where a metallic element was directly adjacent to another element.
- Any two straps that where touching together.
- Between the individual strap elements of the bridle.
, but it really makes a difference.Another important thing is that you don't want your lines to be chubby. In my case, when they got to wide, I cleaned my brush off with white spirit and slimmed them down so the lines were nice and thin. This can take a lot of work, but there is no rush, and it's well worth the effort.
With the black lining finished, I then went in for the final clean up. It turned out that over the course of painting the various elements on the horse, my brush accidently touched previously finished areas, so I had dots of the wrong color paint where they didn't belong. (a dot of Red Umber in the middle of the green blanket for example). So all of that needed to be cleaned up.
Finally here is the completed horse (I tried to get some better pics this time)
Now we can focus on the rider, which we'll get started on in my next post.
Thanks for reading!
Regards,
Phil
Hi Phil
Firstly thanks for answering my questions , very well explained as is this update with good results as we see
The horse is looking very well finished , with the rider on the way will be something to look forward to
If I may the patterns on the saddle cloth looks good but my thoughts are it would benefit further definition and highlighting.......I hasten to add it’s just my thoughts !
Thanks for another fine update looking forward to seeing the next
Have fun @ the bench
Nap
Firstly thanks for answering my questions , very well explained as is this update with good results as we see
The horse is looking very well finished , with the rider on the way will be something to look forward to
If I may the patterns on the saddle cloth looks good but my thoughts are it would benefit further definition and highlighting.......I hasten to add it’s just my thoughts !
Thanks for another fine update looking forward to seeing the next
Have fun @ the bench
Nap
Briggsy
PlanetFigure Supporter
Another interesting read and a rather stunning horse, thanks again Phil a great article.
Cheers Simon
Cheers Simon
phil_h
A Fixture
- Joined
- Apr 22, 2016
- Messages
- 2,681
Hello Everybody,
Once more thanks for the comments guys; always appreciated!
So today is our first post for the warrior. We'll be focusing on two areas - the chest armor and the gambeson.
Chest Armor
To start, here are the paints that were used:
First, I made a mix with Ivory Black and Egyptian Violet, and base-coated everything but the highlight area with it. I'm using the Egyptian Violet because I like my metals to have some color and tone to them. I'm using a violet tone in particular because I think it will complement the yellow elements very nicely, and I also just really like the color . Once that was applied, I then applied pure White Gold to the area that will have the highlight. It looked like this:
Looking at the photo, it's glaringly obvious where I want my highlight to go.
Because it looks utterly ridiculous like that, it's best if we blend it all together. After doing just that, we get this:
Much better.
The very next thing I did was let all that dry. (While things were drying, I moved onto painting other parts of figure - being very careful not to disturb the wet paint!). After the paint dried, I then gave the entire area a wash of the Egyptian Violet and Ivory Black mix. The wash was made by just applying the necessary amount of white spirit - usually enough to get the paint to flow everywhere and have a certain amount of transparency to it. After the wash, we get this:
You can see, it's now a little more toned down and integrated than the last photo.
Again, After waiting for the wash to dry, I then blacklined the individual plates that made up the armor. I did this using just pure Ivory Black. (Actually, one of the few cases where just pure black was used). Here is the blacklining:
That neatens things up quite a bit, and makes the individual plates look much sharper and crisper. As I mentioned I had to wait for some things to dry in between some of the above steps, so in this photo you can see that his left pant leg and boots were worked on in the meantime (which will be detailed in a seperate post).
Our last step for the chest armor was to go back and highlight a few details on the individual plates. Essentially just hitting some of the plate details with pure White Gold (which is actually silver... go figure).
That does it for the chest armor - you can also see that the chain mail on his legs was painted in the exact same way. I may make some tweaks here and there with it, but for the most part, it's time to move on.
Gambeson
For this, the paints used were:
For this element, I wanted to go for a fairly low contrast cloth, very, very worn, that would be of indeterminate color. (could be very, very, very dirty white, or perhaps it's more of a yellow-ish/brown-ish color, etc.) To help with that, I kept everything used to simple earth tones.
The base-tone was applied using just pure Raw Sienna. It's a muddy type of color, a kind of a yellow-ish brown you could say, but it's not dark - it has a fairly neutral value. This makes it a great candidate for painting cloth or other materials that could be dirty or heavily worn, but not necessarily dark in tone. (It's also great for flesh-tones, but that's another story). After applying our base coat, we get this:
Next we can put our shadows in, here they are blocked in, and then smoothed out:
After our shadows we'll go ahead and add some highlights - here they are blocked in and then smoothed, respectively:
Here we can see that it's starting to look like pretty worn cloth, but there are still some things we need to take care of. Before starting on the next steps, I waited for everything to dry.
Once dried, the next thing to do is to apply a wash made from pure Red Umber:
Aside from making things look really dirty it also knocks back our highlights quite a bit. However, before we put our highlights back, let's bring out the individual pieces and help give them definition by lining everything using (again) pure Red Umber:
Ok, now we can put the highlights back - however, when we put them back, we're still not going to go quite as high as we did originally. Here are the re-applied highlights:
That does for the gambeson (the arms were done in the exact same way). An important thing to keep in mind is that for this particular element, we want the finish to be very matte. So when everything has been nice and dry for a while, we'll go back and apply matte varnish to give it the right material finish.
As always, thanks for reading. Hope it's been enjoyable so far.
Regards,
Phil
Once more thanks for the comments guys; always appreciated!
So today is our first post for the warrior. We'll be focusing on two areas - the chest armor and the gambeson.
Chest Armor
To start, here are the paints that were used:
- White Gold from Schmincke
- Egyptian Violet from Williamsburg
- Ivory Black from Williamsburg
First, I made a mix with Ivory Black and Egyptian Violet, and base-coated everything but the highlight area with it. I'm using the Egyptian Violet because I like my metals to have some color and tone to them. I'm using a violet tone in particular because I think it will complement the yellow elements very nicely, and I also just really like the color
. Once that was applied, I then applied pure White Gold to the area that will have the highlight. It looked like this:
Looking at the photo, it's glaringly obvious where I want my highlight to go
.Because it looks utterly ridiculous like that, it's best if we blend it all together. After doing just that, we get this:
Much better
.The very next thing I did was let all that dry. (While things were drying, I moved onto painting other parts of figure - being very careful not to disturb the wet paint!). After the paint dried, I then gave the entire area a wash of the Egyptian Violet and Ivory Black mix. The wash was made by just applying the necessary amount of white spirit - usually enough to get the paint to flow everywhere and have a certain amount of transparency to it. After the wash, we get this:
You can see, it's now a little more toned down and integrated than the last photo.
Again, After waiting for the wash to dry, I then blacklined the individual plates that made up the armor. I did this using just pure Ivory Black. (Actually, one of the few cases where just pure black was used). Here is the blacklining:
That neatens things up quite a bit, and makes the individual plates look much sharper and crisper. As I mentioned I had to wait for some things to dry in between some of the above steps, so in this photo you can see that his left pant leg and boots were worked on in the meantime (which will be detailed in a seperate post).
Our last step for the chest armor was to go back and highlight a few details on the individual plates. Essentially just hitting some of the plate details with pure White Gold (which is actually silver... go figure).
That does it for the chest armor - you can also see that the chain mail on his legs was painted in the exact same way. I may make some tweaks here and there with it, but for the most part, it's time to move on.
Gambeson
For this, the paints used were:
- Red Umber from Michael Harding
- Raw Sienna from Michael Harding
- Italian Yellow Ochre from Williamsburg - This was not used
- Warm White also from Michael Harding
For this element, I wanted to go for a fairly low contrast cloth, very, very worn, that would be of indeterminate color. (could be very, very, very dirty white, or perhaps it's more of a yellow-ish/brown-ish color, etc.) To help with that, I kept everything used to simple earth tones.
The base-tone was applied using just pure Raw Sienna. It's a muddy type of color, a kind of a yellow-ish brown you could say, but it's not dark - it has a fairly neutral value. This makes it a great candidate for painting cloth or other materials that could be dirty or heavily worn, but not necessarily dark in tone. (It's also great for flesh-tones, but that's another story). After applying our base coat, we get this:
Next we can put our shadows in, here they are blocked in, and then smoothed out:
After our shadows we'll go ahead and add some highlights - here they are blocked in and then smoothed, respectively:
Here we can see that it's starting to look like pretty worn cloth, but there are still some things we need to take care of. Before starting on the next steps, I waited for everything to dry.
Once dried, the next thing to do is to apply a wash made from pure Red Umber:
Aside from making things look really dirty it also knocks back our highlights quite a bit. However, before we put our highlights back, let's bring out the individual pieces and help give them definition by lining everything using (again) pure Red Umber:
Ok, now we can put the highlights back - however, when we put them back, we're still not going to go quite as high as we did originally. Here are the re-applied highlights:
That does for the gambeson (the arms were done in the exact same way). An important thing to keep in mind is that for this particular element, we want the finish to be very matte. So when everything has been nice and dry for a while, we'll go back and apply matte varnish to give it the right material finish.
As always, thanks for reading. Hope it's been enjoyable so far
.Regards,
Phil
Briggsy
PlanetFigure Supporter
Again a most interesting post, the metallic oils have come a long way since the 80's & 90's. Some really cracking brushwork.
Cheers Simon
Cheers Simon
Hi Phil
Excellent explanations as always, and a nice result again
I’m learning a lot about Oils by following the V Bench
Look forward to seeing more
Have fun
Nap
Excellent explanations as always, and a nice result again
I’m learning a lot about Oils by following the V Bench
Look forward to seeing more
Have fun
Nap
phil_h
A Fixture
- Joined
- Apr 22, 2016
- Messages
- 2,681
Hello Everybody,
Thanks for the comments guys - the timing couldn't be more perfect either as I was just waiting for some paint to dry to take a final pic for what I was just going to post about.
So today we're going to paint his pants - although, they're only showing on one leg, so it makes the work easier! Let's get to it...
The Pants
First let's take a look at the paints used:
We have:
I can say upfront - when painting these pants, there was a lot of back and forth with shadow and highlight placement - it took several tries and "do-overs" to get things to the point where I liked them. I'll point out some of this as we go along.
First we base-coated the pants using a mix the following:
Here is the base-coat applied:
Pretty straight ahead stuff - and the Quin Magenta is was toned down (we're going to alter the tonality quite a bit later in the process). With the basecoat on, we can turn our attention to the shadows. Using a mix of Turkey Umber with a little bit of our basecoat, we block them in like so:
Kind of hard to see, but hopefully it's apparent where they're blocked in. Once blocked, we then blend them in:
I should mention that my original shadow tone which was a mix of the base-tone and Red Umber was too subtle and didn't provide enough contrast in my opinion. This lead me to start looking around for potentially another color I could use, and this is how the Turkey Umber ultimately became part of the palette. I think it turned out to be a great addition for creating shadows in this case.
With the shadows out of the way, we can now put in some highlights. Here is where I ran into some trouble - I'm not sure why, but it took forever to get the highlights exactly where I wanted them. I had to move them around quite a bunch, and their final placement isn't really apparent until we get to the next stage in our painting.
The first highlight tone was a mix of the basecoat and Naples Yellow with just a tad of the Warm White. Using the Naples Yellow helps lighten up the tone, without it turning into a pink hue that is too garish.
Here is my first attempt at the highlight placement:
In this pic, as mentioned, I'm not quite convinced of the placement here. Further on, this will eventually get moved. Some of the specific issues that I was unhappy with were: the bottom left placement, the top was a little too off-centered, and the bottom right of the pants needed some work. Anyway, here it is blended in:
Despite not being thrilled with my highlight placement, I thought it still needed more contrast as well, so like a moron, instead of fixing things at this step, I just blundered on and continued. So here is the second highlight added:
And here it is blended in:
Now the pic above - aside from showing the 2nd highlight being blended in, was taken after I made quite a few adjustments to the original highlight placement, so I was much happier with things at this point. It's also important that all the touch-up work and tweaking are down now, because the next step is definitely a point of no return.
Now that the pants are more or less finished we can wait for them to be completely dry. This is important because in the next step, we're going to paint an extremely tight pinstripe pattern on them. By waiting for things to dry, I can go ahead and make any corrections to the pinstripes without it affecting any of the work underneath them (and with oils that's really important).
Pinstriping
Being able to draw narrow straight lines I think is an important skill for us to have. All kinds of figures from all kinds of historical periods can benefit from the ability to draw clean, narrow straight lines. Also many freehand patterns can use them as the basis and scaffolding for more complex patterns; they're a great gateway to get into those first steps at freehands.
The color used was Warm White with just a tad of the basecoat mixed in. In order to make the paint flow a little better, I added a small amount of linseed oil to the mix.
Let's paint our first stripe:
So a couple of things:
Here is the second line in place:
The second line is just as important as the first because with the addition of the second line, you've now determined just how tight the pattern is going to be. In this case, the lines will be very, very close together. Let's fast forward a bit:
By the time we're at this point, we can clearly see if things or working (or not). So far, so good, so let's finish it up:
There is the completed pattern in place. It should be very obvious at this point why we'd want to be happy with all the prior work - now would most definitely not be a good time to adjust highlights or shadows,. However we are not quite finished. We need to be consistent with out lighting on our stripes. So I'm going to add highlights to all the stripes where our original 2nd highlight was blocked in:
Subtle, but makes a big difference. The shadows will be taken care of too, but as part of this next step. Which leads us to the... next step.
I mentioned earlier that I was going to change the overall tonality of our original Magenta-ish base coat color. With everything in place we can now go ahead and do that. Most importantly however... make sure everything is dry first! (I think I waited 4 days or so in-between the last step and this step). Here are the paints used:
With that finished, we can now wait for everything to dry and show what the finished pants look like:
With the pants out of the way, our next element will be the turquoise leg protectors (which I started working on while was waiting for things to dry).
Thanks for reading!
Regards,
Phil
Thanks for the comments guys - the timing couldn't be more perfect either as I was just waiting for some paint to dry to take a final pic for what I was just going to post about
.So today we're going to paint his pants - although, they're only showing on one leg, so it makes the work easier! Let's get to it...
The Pants
First let's take a look at the paints used:
We have:
- Turkey Umber from Williamsburg. This is essentially a very, very dark green earth tone. It's really nice for shading and desaturating reds, oranges, etc.
- Red Umber from Michael Harding (of course)
- Quinacridone Magenta from Williamsburg
- Chromium Green from Michael Harding
- Naples Yellow from Williamsburg
- Warm White from Michael Harding
I can say upfront - when painting these pants, there was a lot of back and forth with shadow and highlight placement - it took several tries and "do-overs" to get things to the point where I liked them. I'll point out some of this as we go along.
First we base-coated the pants using a mix the following:
- Quin Magenta - this was the primary color
- A little bit of Chromium Green was added to desaturate the Magenta - which is a highly saturated color and needs to be toned down quite a bit. While not quite an exact complimentary color to the Quin Magenta, it's close enough to one, and it's not too far off in value either. Because the values are similar, I can desaturate the color without lightening or darkening it.
- A little bit of Red Umber - this was added to desaturate further and darken the color.
Here is the base-coat applied:
Pretty straight ahead stuff - and the Quin Magenta is was toned down (we're going to alter the tonality quite a bit later in the process). With the basecoat on, we can turn our attention to the shadows. Using a mix of Turkey Umber with a little bit of our basecoat, we block them in like so:
Kind of hard to see, but hopefully it's apparent where they're blocked in. Once blocked, we then blend them in:
I should mention that my original shadow tone which was a mix of the base-tone and Red Umber was too subtle and didn't provide enough contrast in my opinion. This lead me to start looking around for potentially another color I could use, and this is how the Turkey Umber ultimately became part of the palette. I think it turned out to be a great addition for creating shadows in this case.
With the shadows out of the way, we can now put in some highlights. Here is where I ran into some trouble - I'm not sure why, but it took forever to get the highlights exactly where I wanted them. I had to move them around quite a bunch, and their final placement isn't really apparent until we get to the next stage in our painting.
The first highlight tone was a mix of the basecoat and Naples Yellow with just a tad of the Warm White. Using the Naples Yellow helps lighten up the tone, without it turning into a pink hue that is too garish.
Here is my first attempt at the highlight placement:
In this pic, as mentioned, I'm not quite convinced of the placement here. Further on, this will eventually get moved. Some of the specific issues that I was unhappy with were: the bottom left placement, the top was a little too off-centered, and the bottom right of the pants needed some work. Anyway, here it is blended in:
Despite not being thrilled with my highlight placement, I thought it still needed more contrast as well, so like a moron, instead of fixing things at this step, I just blundered on and continued. So here is the second highlight added:
And here it is blended in:
Now the pic above - aside from showing the 2nd highlight being blended in, was taken after I made quite a few adjustments to the original highlight placement, so I was much happier with things at this point. It's also important that all the touch-up work and tweaking are down now, because the next step is definitely a point of no return
.Now that the pants are more or less finished we can wait for them to be completely dry. This is important because in the next step, we're going to paint an extremely tight pinstripe pattern on them. By waiting for things to dry, I can go ahead and make any corrections to the pinstripes without it affecting any of the work underneath them (and with oils that's really important).
Pinstriping
Being able to draw narrow straight lines I think is an important skill for us to have. All kinds of figures from all kinds of historical periods can benefit from the ability to draw clean, narrow straight lines. Also many freehand patterns can use them as the basis and scaffolding for more complex patterns; they're a great gateway to get into those first steps at freehands.
The color used was Warm White with just a tad of the basecoat mixed in. In order to make the paint flow a little better, I added a small amount of linseed oil to the mix.
Let's paint our first stripe:
So a couple of things:
- I like putting the first line in an easy place to paint the whole line - not an area that's broken up by folds, recesses, etc. Sometimes it's not always possible, but here the ideal placement was fairly obvious.
- My hands are not very steady... not very steady at all. With this in mind, the main idea here is more of being patient and taking the time to correct things than it is being able to just paint a nice crisp line out of the gate. Every single line I painted need to be corrected. I would say that well over half my time with this was spent correcting than it was painting actual lines. Using oils does make the correcting a fairly easy process though.
Here is the second line in place:
The second line is just as important as the first because with the addition of the second line, you've now determined just how tight the pattern is going to be. In this case, the lines will be very, very close together. Let's fast forward a bit:
By the time we're at this point, we can clearly see if things or working (or not
). So far, so good, so let's finish it up:
There is the completed pattern in place. It should be very obvious at this point why we'd want to be happy with all the prior work - now would most definitely not be a good time to adjust highlights or shadows,
. However we are not quite finished. We need to be consistent with out lighting on our stripes. So I'm going to add highlights to all the stripes where our original 2nd highlight was blocked in:
Subtle, but makes a big difference. The shadows will be taken care of too, but as part of this next step. Which leads us to the... next step
.I mentioned earlier that I was going to change the overall tonality of our original Magenta-ish base coat color. With everything in place we can now go ahead and do that. Most importantly however... make sure everything is dry first! (I think I waited 4 days or so in-between the last step and this step). Here are the paints used:
- Neutral Tint from Old Holland - this is a fantastic color. It's a transparent black with a distinct violet hue. It's very similar to Payne's Grey Violet Shade from Williamsburg but slightly more transparent. I plan on making this a regular addition to my palette in the feature - I love it.
- Quinacridone Gold Brown from Williamsburg. I love this color too. It's hard to describe... it's like a golden crimson brown color (if that makes any sense). It can enhance or add richness to just about anything, and it's nice and transparent.
With that finished, we can now wait for everything to dry and show what the finished pants look like:
With the pants out of the way, our next element will be the turquoise leg protectors (which I started working on while was waiting for things to dry).
Thanks for reading!
Regards,
Phil
Briggsy
PlanetFigure Supporter
Great stuff, the gold brown has a dramatic effect on the magenta. I really wouldn't attempt lines like that with acrylics that's for sure.
Cheers Simon
Cheers Simon
Steve Ski
PlanetFigure Supporter
Oh my, you are bloomin brave doing pin stripes! Like the battle of the tartans, one never wishes for such a fight again, HA! Excellent work, Phil, Ruck On!
Hi Phil
Lovely work on the leg , great colour and lining ....the latter explanation is particularly welcome as I’ve many to do on my next project
Again excellent explanation and images
Thanks again for taking the time ..it’s a pleasure to follow
.....hope you’ve got the next model in your mind
Happy benchtime ....looking forward to seeing more
Nap
Lovely work on the leg , great colour and lining ....the latter explanation is particularly welcome as I’ve many to do on my next project
Again excellent explanation and images
Thanks again for taking the time ..it’s a pleasure to follow
.....hope you’ve got the next model in your mind
Happy benchtime ....looking forward to seeing more
Nap
clubcat
PlanetFigure Supporter
A fantastic tutorial Phil. Love the pinstripes. As an oil painter myself it is great to see your use of alternative colours on your palette with clear instructions on how to get the best from them. Thanks.
Melanie
Melanie
Ferris
A Fixture
Loving your SBSs. Very clear and entertaining as well.
Great work on the figure. Parallel lines are so hard…outstanding work!
Adrian
Great work on the figure. Parallel lines are so hard…outstanding work!
Adrian
phil_h
A Fixture
- Joined
- Apr 22, 2016
- Messages
- 2,681
Hello Everybody,
Thanks for the comments once again everybody!
Getting back to some more mundane stuff, we gotta paint this guy's leg protection. In this case we're going to paint them a somewhat fanciful turquoise color (Our warrior is a fancy lad, what can I say?). We're also going to decorate them with another freehand pattern, which will be much more complex than some simple pinstripes. The freehand portion of this element will be done in the next post though (Actually next couple of posts). So, onto the...
Leg protectors
Let's take a look at the paints we'll be using to paint these things:
We have here:
First we're going to create our mid-tone and basecoat each leg protector with it. Our basecoat mix will consist of the Turquoise with some of the Red Umber mixed into it. The Turquoise by itself is just way, way too saturated and vibrant, but since we're painting a historical figure and not a fantasy one, we want to tone this down a little bit and take the edge off. Once mixed, we can apply:
(those are some serious folds on this thing by the way - this will unfortunately make things much, much more difficult with the freehand stuff on this element).
Let's put in our shadows. Our first shadow mix will consist of Turquoise mixed with the Egyptian Violet until we get to the desired darkness of tone. (I should also point out that you can use Egyptian/Dioxizine Violet to turn almost any color into a unique looking shadow tone, but I digress...).
The shadows are blocked in pretty much where you'd expect them to be. Let's blend them in:
After blending things in and taking a look, it turns out there isn't enough contrast in some of the deeper shadow areas so we'll need add a darker shadow in select areas. This darker shadow was created using pure Turkey Umber - which since it is a very dark green color, it will work nicely with the Turquoise (which has some green in it) for a shadow tone. Let's go ahead and block that in:
You can see the areas in question are underneath the two big folds in the fabric. Also, Turkey Umber is a pretty opaque color, so a little goes quite a way - you can see I have just some small lines applied. After blending we get:
That's better. Now we can get on with the highlights. For our highlight tone, we took our basecoat and mixed some Warm White into it. Here we can see our highlights blocked in:
Again, because of the big folds, it should be pretty obvious where we want to place our highlights. Let's blend them in:
Not too bad, but again, as with the shadow we will need much more contrast, so let's add more Warm White to our first highlight mix (to get our second highlight mix), and block in some more highlights. This time though, we'll apply them inside the areas where our first highlights are, but in a more selective fashion:
Ok, now we're talking. Let's get these bad-boys blended in so they don't stick out so much:
So that does it for now. Once this is all dry, we're going to paint (yet) another freehand pattern all over them. Something a little more involved than pinstripes. But we have to wait for everything to get nice and dry first.
Thanks for reading!
Regards,
Phil
Thanks for the comments once again everybody!
Getting back to some more mundane stuff, we gotta paint this guy's leg protection. In this case we're going to paint them a somewhat fanciful turquoise color (Our warrior is a fancy lad, what can I say?). We're also going to decorate them with another freehand pattern, which will be much more complex than some simple pinstripes. The freehand portion of this element will be done in the next post though (Actually next couple of posts). So, onto the...
Leg protectors
Let's take a look at the paints we'll be using to paint these things:
We have here:
- Egyptian Violet from Williamsburg (also known as Dioxizine Purple)
- Turkey Umber from Williamsburg
- Red Umber from Michael Harding
- Phthalocyanine (Phthalo) Turquoise from Michael Harding
- Warm White from Michael Harding
First we're going to create our mid-tone and basecoat each leg protector with it. Our basecoat mix will consist of the Turquoise with some of the Red Umber mixed into it. The Turquoise by itself is just way, way too saturated and vibrant, but since we're painting a historical figure and not a fantasy one, we want to tone this down a little bit and take the edge off. Once mixed, we can apply:
(those are some serious folds on this thing by the way - this will unfortunately make things much, much more difficult with the freehand stuff on this element).
Let's put in our shadows. Our first shadow mix will consist of Turquoise mixed with the Egyptian Violet until we get to the desired darkness of tone. (I should also point out that you can use Egyptian/Dioxizine Violet to turn almost any color into a unique looking shadow tone, but I digress...).
The shadows are blocked in pretty much where you'd expect them to be. Let's blend them in:
After blending things in and taking a look, it turns out there isn't enough contrast in some of the deeper shadow areas so we'll need add a darker shadow in select areas. This darker shadow was created using pure Turkey Umber - which since it is a very dark green color, it will work nicely with the Turquoise (which has some green in it) for a shadow tone. Let's go ahead and block that in:
You can see the areas in question are underneath the two big folds in the fabric. Also, Turkey Umber is a pretty opaque color, so a little goes quite a way - you can see I have just some small lines applied. After blending we get:
That's better. Now we can get on with the highlights. For our highlight tone, we took our basecoat and mixed some Warm White into it. Here we can see our highlights blocked in:
Again, because of the big folds, it should be pretty obvious where we want to place our highlights. Let's blend them in:
Not too bad, but again, as with the shadow we will need much more contrast, so let's add more Warm White to our first highlight mix (to get our second highlight mix), and block in some more highlights. This time though, we'll apply them inside the areas where our first highlights are, but in a more selective fashion:
Ok, now we're talking
. Let's get these bad-boys blended in so they don't stick out so much:
So that does it for now. Once this is all dry, we're going to paint (yet) another freehand pattern all over them. Something a little more involved than pinstripes. But we have to wait for everything to get nice and dry first
.Thanks for reading!
Regards,
Phil
Briggsy
PlanetFigure Supporter
Some great use if colours one wouldn't automatically reach for when creating shade in a turquoise item, well I wouldn't at any rate. Again very informative and beautifully done.
Cheers Simon
Cheers Simon
phil_h
A Fixture
- Joined
- Apr 22, 2016
- Messages
- 2,681
Hello Everybody,
Simon and Nigel - thanks for the comments. (And yes Nigel - there is more than enough room for you here on the oily side ).
Now that our leg protectors have dried, we can start on the first part of our freehand pattern for them. This post will cover getting the basic scaffolding in place.
The color used for all the painting below is a mix of the Phthalo Turquoise from the last post with a lot of Warm White (also from the last post) mixed into. It's essentially a pale blue-ish off-white color.
I should also mention that although we aren't painting pinstripes, everything said about painting lines applies here as well.
Freehand Pt. 1
We'll start by painting a horizontal border along the bottom of the leg protectors like so:
He's looking a little lonely, so let's paint another one right on top of this one:
With our border in place we're now going to paint a grid of diamonds over the entire element. This diamond pattern will serve as the foundation for the rest. However, there are some things we need to take into consideration - mainly:
It turns out that there is an easy way to take the above into consideration, and it looks like this:
Using a piece of narrow masking tape, I laid it out on top of the element in the direction I wanted my lines to lie. Once the tape is in place (I should add here is yet another reason why you want all the prior work completely dry), go ahead and paint a line that right up against the top of the masking tape. If done correctly, this line will properly take all the folds into account, and most importantly, serve as a nice reference point for all the other lines. With our guide line painted, we can now remove the tape. Here is how things look:
And on the other leg:
This picture of his right leg really shows (especially towards the bottom half) how distorted our line actually needs to be. Let's paint a few more lines in:
As we paint more lines, we can see how the guide line makes it much easier for the other lines to follow. Here are the lines finished for the first part:
With this part done, our pattern is coming along, and our lines are laying very naturally on the fabric. Our next step is to paint a reference line for the other half of the pattern. This is easier than the original reference line because we have quite a bit in place already. Here is what this looks like:
I picked a spot, and just made sure the diamonds I would make will respect the placement of all the prior lines. Let's fast forward a bit:
And again on the right-hand side:
Because we were careful, and put in a little extra effort in the beginning in how everything lies over the folds of the fabric, we can see really nice geometrical diamonds emerging.
Here are both legs finished:
The last pic especially shows how even with the giant folds in the fabric, we're able to keep our diamonds nice and oriented properly.
In the next post, after everything is dry, we'll finish off our pattern.
Hopefully this proves to be useful!
Thanks for reading,
Regards,
Phil
Simon and Nigel - thanks for the comments. (And yes Nigel - there is more than enough room for you here on the oily side
).Now that our leg protectors have dried, we can start on the first part of our freehand pattern for them. This post will cover getting the basic scaffolding in place.
The color used for all the painting below is a mix of the Phthalo Turquoise from the last post with a lot of Warm White (also from the last post) mixed into. It's essentially a pale blue-ish off-white color.
I should also mention that although we aren't painting pinstripes, everything said about painting lines applies here as well.
Freehand Pt. 1
We'll start by painting a horizontal border along the bottom of the leg protectors like so:
He's looking a little lonely, so let's paint another one right on top of this one:
With our border in place we're now going to paint a grid of diamonds over the entire element. This diamond pattern will serve as the foundation for the rest. However, there are some things we need to take into consideration - mainly:
- How/where do we start?
- How do we take the folds of the fabric into account? This is actually very important, because since we aren't painting over a flat surface - but one that is distorted from folds, etc. Our diamonds are going to have to show and reflect this - the geometry of the pattern is going to have to take this into consideration. Consequently, we'll have to make sure our diamonds are distorted properly to be consistent with the folds and alignment of the fabric. I can say this up-front - if you ignore this, and just try to brute-force paint a flat grid of diamonds over everything, it will not look right... trust me .
It turns out that there is an easy way to take the above into consideration, and it looks like this:
Using a piece of narrow masking tape, I laid it out on top of the element in the direction I wanted my lines to lie. Once the tape is in place (I should add here is yet another reason why you want all the prior work completely dry), go ahead and paint a line that right up against the top of the masking tape. If done correctly, this line will properly take all the folds into account, and most importantly, serve as a nice reference point for all the other lines. With our guide line painted, we can now remove the tape. Here is how things look:
And on the other leg:
This picture of his right leg really shows (especially towards the bottom half) how distorted our line actually needs to be. Let's paint a few more lines in:
As we paint more lines, we can see how the guide line makes it much easier for the other lines to follow. Here are the lines finished for the first part:
With this part done, our pattern is coming along, and our lines are laying very naturally on the fabric. Our next step is to paint a reference line for the other half of the pattern. This is easier than the original reference line because we have quite a bit in place already. Here is what this looks like:
I picked a spot, and just made sure the diamonds I would make will respect the placement of all the prior lines. Let's fast forward a bit:
And again on the right-hand side:
Because we were careful, and put in a little extra effort in the beginning in how everything lies over the folds of the fabric, we can see really nice geometrical diamonds emerging.
Here are both legs finished:
The last pic especially shows how even with the giant folds in the fabric, we're able to keep our diamonds nice and oriented properly.
In the next post, after everything is dry, we'll finish off our pattern.
Hopefully this proves to be useful!
Thanks for reading,
Regards,
Phil
Briggsy
PlanetFigure Supporter
Nice idea with the masking tape, might have to try that next time I attempt tartan. Do you seal what you've painted with varnish before proceeding with the next stage? Another great article, many thanks.
Cheers Simon
Cheers Simon
