Hello Everybody,
Thanks for the comments and kind words everybody, as always, they are very much appreciated!
Simon - I actually use a NMM approach for all the fantasy/sci-fi figures I paint. Here's a space marine I painted early in 2024 - all in NMM (click for bigger pics) - He's painted 100% in oils:
For historicals, I've always preferred TMM, however, I try to approach my TMM in the same fashion I would with NMM regarding lights and shadows.
Adrian - couldn't agree more. Once the rest of the figure is near complete, I will definitely go back and see if there are any additional highlights needed on those ridges.
Alright, with all that done our post today will consist of the first part of a the freehand pattern we're going to paint on the inside of our guy's cloak.
The paints used were:
From left to right we have:
- French Umber (Williamsburg) for our shadows
- Quinacridone Magenta (Williamsburg) for our base tone
- Warm Light Yellow (Michael Harding) for our pattern outlines.
As mentioned our focus is going to be the inside of our bust's cloak. The inside of the cloak will be a rich magenta tone, with a paisley pattern painted on top. Our approach will be to:
- Paint the base tone and shadows - this will lay the base down for our pattern
- Paint the outlines of all of our paisleys - making sure they're exactly where we want them and they're spaced out properly
- Paint the inside of each paisley with different patterns
- Paint the areas around and in-between each paisley with a floral/dotted type pattern.
In order to make this a little more bite-sized, the focus for this post will be the first two steps in the above list. I will also mention that the reference I'm using for this particular pattern can be found in Kirill Kanaev's wonderful book,
Figure Painting Techniques F.A.Q published by AK.
We will first base coat the inside of the cloak using the Quin Magenta with just a tiny bit of the French Burnt Umber mixed into it to ever so slightly desaturate it. Here's the base coat:
While still wet, we'll block and blend our shadows in. The shadow work here is pretty subtle, we don't want that much contrast in this case, because the pattern we're going to paint is going to cover almost the entire element. Here are the shadows completed:
Next we're going to let this all dry,
and dry thoroughly! Quin Magenta is a notoriously slow dryer, so I had to wait 3-4 days for this to dry as opposed to the normal overnight time period.
With everything nice and dry, we can focus on painting our paisley shapes. For a curvy shape like this, I find it definitely helps to practice and build a little muscle memory before hand, so I grabbed a piece of blank printer paper, a pen, and did a little bit of practicing:
It's really amazing how much little exercises like this can help you. I've never painted a paisley pattern before, so it was definitely worth the extra 20 minutes of effort or so. With our practicing out of the way, we can now start painting these in on our cloak - we'll use the Warm Light Yellow. Another important thing is to make sure they're big enough for the pattern we intend to paint inside of them. Here's our attempt:
And, it's not good
. The prior practicing definitely helped with the basic shape, but... As I've mentioned before in other posts where I'm discussing freehand designs, my hands shake, I'm not too particularly gifted artistically, and my eyes are terrible.
However, (as I've also mentioned before) the ability to paint nice freehand patterns doesn't depend on any of that... They depend essentially on patience and being incredibly stubborn! I think it's important to include mistakes, messiness, etc. Because I don't know anybody that just nails it on one take (well, maybe Alexandre Cortina), and I'd like to show the kinds of trials and travails that we all have to go through...
So with a little clean up we get this:
This is much, much better. I also mentioned that for patterns like this, I like to start in a place that will allow me to paint the pattern in whole, and also a place where I can then gauge where all the other elements will be placed. We'll now go ahead and paint the rest of the paisley outlines in place taking into account:
- Making sure they're even placed and are evenly distributed across the cloak
- Any folds (The fact that this almost entirely consists of folds definitely does not help)
Here is the finished element, zoomed out a little bit more for context:
I think this is the hardest part of what we'll be doing. In the next post, we'll cover the pattern that will be painted inside each of these shapes.
Thanks for reading!
Regards,
-Phil
