Renaissance Knight Red

[SDowning]

Hello,

Does anyone know of the steps/ technique that Pietro Balloni used in the painting of reds in his renaissance Knight that is on the cover of the latest Andreas Figure International Magazine (Issue #16). Since he paints in oils, I am very curious as to what the base colors were and how he painted it (ie, shadows first/ last or in a several different painting session, etc.). I just like the way that he has created the depth and contrast of the shadows but still in keeping the intensity of the red and its highlights. Thank You for your help. Sean Downing

 

[Major_Goose]

Sean hi. Pietro uses oil colors over an acrylic paint undercoat. He uses an undercoat pretty close to what he needs for a base. After itsdry he goes with the shadow color from the lower point of shadow , that he needs solid heavy shadow and spreading it (and also lightening it ) tothe higher spots that he needs less shadow or almost none. The samehe does withhighlightsbut in reverse order. He goes withthe solid highlight color on the extreme highlight spot and spreads - smooths it out to the areas that he needs less highlight . in the border spots he does blending by tapping the clean unloaded brush vertically on the bordering surface of the colors to be blending. I f i recall well the colors used on the knight are black for the shadowing part and some mixture of red over a reddish undercoat. But nothing stays solid as he almost blends everything. Seeing Pietro doing it seems so simple , but after this trying to do it yourself needs lots of practice and experience. I had the great luck to see him doimg this techniques and its really awsome .

I hope i helped some

 

[SDowning]

Hi Costas,
Thank you for your response, that makes perfect sense to me. It sounds to me like this was done straight over the acrylic undercoat and not wet on wet. I had tried to duplicate the look that he got but I tend to paint very thin and just keep adding layers but the results were not the same. I will give this a try and let you know. Thanks again. Sean

 

[Einion]

I can't add much to what Costas has said Sean. I would have guessed that he'd used black for the shadows from how it looks. It's a good idea to use a cad red if you have one because of opacity.

For highlights on red using white alone tends to make pink obviously (although with cad reds they're not too vivid so they may not look too out of place) but a good way around this is to use a mix of white and yellow (or white and orange) to highlight. If you want them more low-key you can try white and brown.

Einion