Brian,
The "formula" for the leather jacket - and pretty much any brown leather at all - is to paint it with Testor paints in the little rectangular bottles. Sorry, for you Brits this stuff may not be readily available. For Americans, any Michaels or Hobby Lobby or such kind of chain stores will carry these traditional Testor paints.
I start with a base coat of Testor 1183 Rubber. This is a very dark and deep brown. Then I work dark to light with highlights using various mixtures of the aforementioned Rubber and 1166 Flat Brown and 1185 Rust. You can also use 1167 Flat Tan or 1170 Light Tan - these various browns will give you pretty wide variety of different brown hues to work with. The latter (1170) is also the color I use for painting flesh. It is, far and away, the best flesh color I have ever used. Naturally, Testor quit manufacturing it a couple of years ago......
These Testor paints have a natural leathery sheen right out of the bottle. No top coat is necessary to obtain that nice leather sheen.
Glibert,
Thanks!! Photography. I am not sure why so many have problems with it. My camera is a Canon EOS Rebel XTI. The camera is a good quality digital camera and, apart from the lenses and resolution, has nothing at all to do with whether the photos are good or bad! That is down to lighting. Period.
I use table-top swing arm desk lamps of the type you get in hardware stores. These are easily adjustable so you can direct the light where it is needed. You do need 100 watt bulbs, which are getting hard to find. When you do, stock up! I also use 75 and 60 watt bulbs if I want to vary intensity from one side or the other.
The "trick" is where you place the lamps in relation to the figure. We paint our figures with the "halo" lighting effect as described by Shep Paine. Well, light your models the same way. Place the lamps in front of and above the figures at a 45 to 60 degree angle and keep them close enough to provide good saturated illumination. Be careful to point the lamps toward the model. Working with lamps this close, it is easy to throw light into the camera lens if you are not paying attention. The higher the angle, the more deep "drop shadows" will be cast. I generally use a lower angle - 45 degrees - for painted figures to avoid creating shadows in areas that are not painted that way. DO NOT - I repeat, DO NOT put the lights directly in front of the figure! This will throw light right up into your carefully painted shadow areas and obliterate all of the work you put into painting them in. The higher angles 60 to 80 degrees are only used for photographing raw sculpts which have no artificial shadows painted in.
With these incandescent lights, be sure to set your camera for tungsten or "indoor" lighting to negate the yellowing effect of indoor light bulbs. You can also use an 80A blue filter to achieve the same result. Set the camera for aperture priority and set at the smallest aperture f16, f22 or f32 depending on your camera. This will give you the best depth of field for closeups - but long exposures. That means a tripod and a shutter release are mandatory. If you do closeup work, that should be a given anyway.
Simple. Now I expect everybody to post decent photos here!
Cheers!!
Mike
