WIP Young Miniatures Arabian Knight bust

[Briggsy]

Nice work with metallic oils, they have come a long way since I gave up on them in the 80's & 90's. Not sure if your familiar with the world of flat painting but Mike Taylors book 'The art of the flat tin figure' explains NMM with oils very well. Flats it has to be said lend themselves to this method as you can only look at them one way.

I'm currently experimenting with doing similar to your approach but with acrylics, so this has been very informative, thank you.

Cheers Simon

 

[BRAN]

I missed your post Phil, what a job! Your step by step are always very clear and very well illustrated. Too bad I don't paint in oils, it would help me a lot. Thanks for sharing your skills!!

 

[NigelR]

Metallic oils? Something I'd never even considered. You seem to have mastered them though and got a great result here.

 

[MalcC]

Very nice work Phil, and a very helpful SBS.

Makc

 

[Ferris]

Excellent work and feel-good studying material Phil, as always!

While you are precision-painting the breastplate, wouldn’t it be possible to highlight some of the ridges in the highlighted area? I think that would give some additional brightness to the silver. Not needed though, as the work is already tasty as it is. Just an idea.

Adrian

 

[phil_h]

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

 

[Briggsy]

Another great lesson, love the space Marine, it was figures in this size that moved me over to acrylic as I had terrible times trying to paint them in oils.

The Magenta is nice but if you had let me know I probably still have a couple of paisley ties hidden away somewhere!

One thing I want to mention and you have given me part of the answer with the practice shapes. I always tend to do patterns too big on my first attempt and have to start again, so yes the practice makes great sense.

Cheers Simon

 

[NigelR]

More lovely work. I think the freehand paisley patterns are looking good so far. Maybe it would've helped if you grew up in the 60s like me? I remember a trip to Portobello Road Market with my parents in 1967 and they bought me a lovely paisley kipper tie. That pattern is seared into my brain......

 

[Nap]

Hi Phil

Great updates , sorry thought I’d caught up ....fine explanation and it’s coming along rather nicely

Look forward to the patterns

Nice Space marine as well ...no end to your skill

You should be able to do up to 35 pics per post ...will confirm

Have fun at the bench

Nap

PS I googled ref the Paisley ........pure style Nigel

 

[phil_h]

Hello Everybody,

Simon, Nigel, and Nap - thanks for the humorous and kind words! Yes, I have no doubt had I grown up in the 60s, this would've been a much easier pattern to paint !

I would've liked to have posted sooner, but I got I got caught up in another project while waiting for paint to dry on this one. Anyway...

In today's post, we're going to expand on (quite a bit) and finish off the pattern we started on in the last post. Let's start with the paints used:


From left to right we have:

• Warm Light Yellow (Michael Harding)
• Primary Blue (Blockx)
• Veronese Green (Williamsburg Oils)
• Cadmium Yellow Medium (Williamsburg Oils)
• Sevres Blue (Williamsburg Oils)
• Cadmium Vermillion (Williamsburg Oils)
• Cadmium Orange (Williamsburg Oils)

All of the above paints were used to paint the pattern and its constituent elements. With the exception of the Primary Blue from Blockx, all had a little bit of Titanium White (Old Holland) mixed into them to make them a little bit more opaque. Most of these paints are pretty opaque to begin with (especially the Cadmiums), but by mixing in a little bit of the white, we make the opacity a little stronger. Of course, you have to be careful, because you can (obviously) lighten your colors, which isn't what we're going for, so when doing this, just add a very small amount. For this bit of painting, we want our paints to be extra opaque because we're going to be painting a lot of layers on top of each other, and we don't want anything to show through.

Alright, let's get started. For reference, we last left off here:


This is where we want to eventually get to:


Obviously, quite a bit happened in-between those two photos; lets see how we can break things down to get to the end in one piece .

As I've mentioned several times before, the best way to approach complex patterns is to try to break them down into simpler, separate elements. Let's do that here (In my case the photo I used was taken from the book, Figure Painting Techniques F.A.Q by Kirill Kanaev). I think by doing this, it'll give a little more context to what or why I made certain decisions regarding order of operations, etc... It'll also be a nice change from how I usually write up freehand stuff

Looking at the finished pattern, I thought it would be easier to tackle the inside of the paisley first. There is no right or wrong here to determine where to start something like this. We can immediately see that inside each paisley - going from outside in - we have several borders of different colors. These borders are actually a little simpler to paint than you might think. There is a little trick... Instead of trying to paint them as borders or stripes, paint the entire space that color, and after its dry, go in with the next color, and paint everything inside, but just leave a little bit of edge showing of the prior color.

We'll start with the outer most border, which we'll paint using the Primary Blue, mixed with a little Mars Black (Vasari Oils - this was not pictured) to paint the entire inside of the paisley:



Before I went ahead and filled this in, I made sure that the borders painted in the last post where completely dry. This is for the very obvious reason that I will definitely accidently paint "outside" the lines, and I'll have to go in with white spirit and clean things up. And the last thing I want to do is erase the borders by accident!! Aside from that, there is nothing too hard here - its literally just filling in the shapes.


Looking at our reference above, we can see that inside the blue border is a yellow, so once the blue has dried, we'll fill in most of that with the Cadmium Yellow (remember, we mixed a little bit of Titanium White to get it more opaque). Here is this step:


Again, this was pretty simple, and we now have a nice, even blue border. Since the blue was dry, if we mess up or parts of the border/edge aren't even, we can go in with a little white spirit and make things better. One thing I think worth pointing out is that by using an opaque color (Cadmium Yellow) and then mixing in a little bit of the white, I got complete coverage with just one coat/layer. We'll let this layer dry now. Also shown in the photo above is the fact that while waiting for this to dry, I went ahead and base coated, shadowed, and highlighted the outside of the cloak - but that will be discussed in a future post...

Next we see that the final color of the paisley is orange. So just like we did with the yellow, we'll take our Cadmium Orange, mix a little bit of Titanium White into it, and cover the center of the shape and leave just enough of the yellow showing to create a nice border (Using white spirit to fix anything if needed):


Now we have a nice yellow inner border for our shape. We've now completed laying down the main colors inside our shape, and we can move onto the ornamentation. We'll be doing 3 different ornamentations in our element - the inside of each border will be dotted, and inside the center, we're going to get a V or U like flower petal shape.

As before, let's work from the outside in. This means, we'll go ahead and put the dots in our blue border:


The dots were made with pure Warm Light Yellow. The only care here is to make sure they're spaced as evenly as you can make them. Let's wait for them to dry, and put in the dots for the yellow, inside border:


These dots were made with the Veronese Green - it's basically a little bit brighter, more opaque version of "Emerald" green. It's a very pretty color. Again, we'll let these dry.

While waiting for both the orange and the dots to dry, I decided to go ahead and paint the "petals" of our paisley. This was by far the most difficult part of the pattern, and took almost the entire day. They were painted using the Warm Light Yellow. To make this easier, I decided to break this down into its own separate parts. The first part are the lines painted around the outside of each paisley, and the second part are the tops connecting all the lines. Here is the first part:



If you look at the bottom right of the photo above, you can see all the lines painted in. Once all the lines are in, I just connected them together by painting the letter 'C' across the tops of all the lines:


That's the finished petals, let's go ahead and do all of the rest of them:


I can't tell you how happy I was after finishing this step .


By now, our dots and orange centers have dried, so lets go ahead and paint the last of the ornaments inside the center of each paisley:


We'll just paint in some 'U' or 'V' shaped elements to make things look a little busier and balanced out. These were painted using Sevres Blue and (here we go again) a little bit of Titanium White mixed into it.

With the centers finished, we've now completed the paisley elements, and we can now focus on the area outside the shapes. To complement the paisley, we'll go with a floral/dots pattern. Before we start filling everything in with dots, lets take a look at where there is a lot of empty space between each paisley, and put some small flowers there. Each flower was painted with a center painted using our Sevres Blue mix, and the petals were painted using Cadmium Red Vermillion. Here is the first flower:


If you look at the bottom of the photo above, on the right side, you can see the completed flower, and you can also see the blue centers I painted in. I put the centers in first, so I could gauge the balance and space between each of the flowers. Here are all the flowers completed:


All of the flowers were painted by using a dotting motion instead of a typical stroking motion.

Now that the flowers are in, we can go ahead and finish the pattern. In all the space left over, we're going to paint trails of dots using the Cadmium Orange:


And we're finished! Here's another pic of the finished pattern:


And this entire time, there was the other side as well :


In our next post, we'll tackle the outside of the cloak, which will be another freehand, but I'm not sure what it'll be just yet.

Thanks for reading!

Regards,
-Phil

 

[Briggsy]

Wow, having painted the odd single Paisley on Indian Army figures I know how fiddly it is. Your methodical approach makes a lot of sense oh and the lesson in pointillism of course. Another fantastic post.

Cheers Simon

 

[NigelR]

That is amazing! Superb brush work all round. And again, thanks for sharing your process.

 

[BRAN]

Still as interesting, we learn a lot of things (at least me) and it will help me to create paterns for a future project that I have in mind....

 

[clubcat]

My word, I enjoyed that. Did you have a reference piece to give you the patterns and colours or were they "just made up"? Thanks. I'd also never considered adding Titanium White to increase opacity, I finally have a reason to use my tube....
Melanie

 

[Nap]

That is amazing! Superb brush work all round. And again, thanks for sharing your process.

Your certainly right there Nigel

The SBS pics are great as is the descriptions...a really enjoyable read

You’ve definately got very high patience and excellent results as a result

Looking forward to seeing more and what you decide to do on the cape

Have fun @ the bench

Nap

“Another project”.......intriguing

 

[phil_h]

Hello Everybody,

Unfortunately, due to some amazing weather, I've been at the beach and pool more than at the bench , so I'm a little behind. Anyway...

Again, thanks for the kind words everybody - I'm glad you're finding something to enjoy while I blather on. Melanie, the colors where not made up, they were largely based on the color scheme Kirill Kanaev used on his version of this bust. (However, from this point forward the colors are all my own choices).


In today's post, we're going to finish off the cloak in its entirety. There is the painting of the cloak itself, the freehand pattern, and the border around the outside of the cloak. There is quite a lot to go over; this is going to be a longer post, so once again, strap yourselves in!

Let's start with the basic painting of the cloak. We'll be using these colors:

From left to right we have:

• French Burnt Umber (Williamsburg Oils) - this is for our shadow tones.
• Egyptian Violet (Williamsburg Oils) - this is also for our shadow tones.
• Veronese Green (Williamsburg Oils) - this is going to be our main color for our cloak. It's a really nice, rich opaque emerald green color.
• Not pictured is Warm Light Yellow (Michael Harding) - this is our highlight color.

Let's go ahead and basecoat the outside of the cloak with our Veronese Green:


As always with our base coats, we want to have a nice, smooth, even layer. Wiping off any excess paint with a clean brush is very helpful for this.

We're going to block in our shadows now. For our shadow tone, we're going to make a mix of French Burnt Umber and Egyptian Violet. We want to start off with the burnt umber, and keep mixing little bits of violet into it until we can start to see the the violet in the mix, and we get a nice violet/dark brown tone. Next we'll determine where exactly we want our shadows and then sketch them in right in top of the wet green paint:


One thing worth pointing out is that you don't need whole lot of paint to block in the various shadow areas. Really just a small line/sliver for each shadow. With these applied to our cloak, we can smooth them out and blend them in:


As we can see, even with just those little lines of dark paint, after they're blended in, we're able to get all the coverage we need for our shadows. A couple of notes at this point:

• It can be hard to see, but for me, some of the shadows are a little too deep, and should be a lightened up. This could easily be done by mixing an in-between tone with the basecoat and shadow tones, and then add this to each shadow area we want to lighten up. If I was just going to keep the cloak like this, I definitely would spend more time tweaking things here. However...
• As with the inside of the cloak, we'll be covering the entire outside of the cloak with a freehand pattern. In many cases this will cover much of the shadow areas, and by having them a little darker than normal in some areas, we'll still be able read these areas as in shadow.

Next we'll apply our highlights. We'll first mix a tone Veronese Green and Warm Light Yellow. Since we're using a highlight tone that has a small amount of yellow in it as opposed to pure white, we'll push our highlight tone into a warmer more yellow spectrum. This will sit really well as a base for freehand, because there will be lots of yellow tones in it. Here are the highlights added and blended in:



This completes the basic painting of the cloak. There is no reason why anyone couldn't stop here and call it a day . However... the inside of the cloak for our boy here is really fancy, and I think he'd be really disappointed if we weren't equally as fancy on the outside of the cloak. So let us move onto the freehand. (After waiting for everything to completely dry, of course.)

For a while I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but ultimately, I thought it would be best if I continued with a very similar and related pattern that the inside of the cloak had. So once again... paisley! The colors used for the freehand were:


From right to left we have:

• Veronese Green (Williamsburg Oils) - as mentioned above
• Provence Violet Bluish (Williamsburg Oils) - This is a basic mid-valued violet tone that is fairly Opaque. It's really just a convenience tone - it's Williamsburg's Egyptian Violet with Titanium White mixed into it. We could totally mix this ourselves, but it's nice to have had all the work done for us.
• Mars Yellow (Vasari) - Very similar to Yellow Ochre but much more opaque. More and more this is becoming my "go to" yellow.
• Cadmium Yellow Medium (Williamsburg Oils) - Very saturated and opaque yellow tone. This can really add a punch and make something pop.
• Titanium White (Old Holland) - This is mainly used here to make each color slightly more opaque (as mentioned in the previous post).

A lot of this will be a repeat from the last post, so I'll be brief. First let's draw our little paisley guys in. To do this we'll make a mix with Mars Yellow and Cadmium Yellow:


One difference here as compared to the inside of the cloak, is that there are lot more folds we need to contend with, and we have to be much more careful with how we place each individual element. We want enough room in between them that we'll be able to paint additional elements in those spaces. Next we'll fill each one in with pure Provence Violet:


Pretty simple. Next we'll fill in again but this time in a smaller area and with a mix of Mars Yellow and Cadmium Yellow medium - the same tone we made the outlines with:


Again, pretty straight ahead, and we now have a nice violet border. While waiting for the insides to dry, I decided to go ahead and paint in the petals of each paisley element. As I mentioned in the last post, this was by far the more time consuming part. These were painted using the same yellow mix we've been using. Here they are in progress:


In the element that is a little left of center, you can see how I'm creating these. First I'm painting some small straight lines perpendicular to the border. Next, I'm connecting them by painting little 'C' like lines at top. You can see at this stage I've connected three of the petals together. Lets finish them out:


Again, this took forever, and all the folds in the cloak really didn't help things...

By the time the petals were finished, the insides we're dry enough for us to give them a little more detail. As we did in our last post, we'll go ahead and paint some dots into the inside border of each paisley element. For the dots we're going to use pure Veronese Green:


It's kind of weird how when these dots are painted on top of the violet, the color shifts to look more blue than green...

It turns out that the yellow in the center of each element wasn't quite dry yet, so I moved onto painting the elements outside of the paisleys. For the inside of the cloak, we did little flowers, and we'll do that too, however, where the inside cloaks flowers where rounded in shape, here we're going for a more star/triangular shape. Here is the first flower painted in:


We can see out little flower right in the middle there. The middle is the same yellow mix we've been using, and the petals are pure Provence Violet. After making sure we like what we got, let's put in all the rest:


I should mention (as I have before), that when doing these kind of small geometrical elements, there is no rush... take your time!! It is important that they all look uniform - although if there are tiny variances it's no big deal. They just have to look uniform in aggregate. This is something I think that is really important to stress. Even with small variances from element to element, if they are uniform enough, your brain will actually just think they are all the same! I'm sure there is some scientific word or name for this kind of effect...

With the flowers in, it turns out the centers of each paisley are now dry and we can finish them up. For some reason, the little paisley elements reminded me of fish, so I decided to paint a scale like pattern in the middle of each using the violet - I made sure each one is slightly different from the others:


Next we're back to the outside areas. With the inner cloak, we used a pattern of dots to connect everything together, here we're going to do something similar, but instead of dots, we're going to use vines. Vines and vine-like patterns are an absolute staple with middle eastern arabesque patterns. So lets start painting vines - first we'll just paint the lines that connect everything. Here we are starting out:


We can see at the bottom center how we're connecting our flowers together. Here is the finished scaffolding for the vines:


With these done, we're going to ornament each vine with a random pattern of leaf elements, curly-cues, lines, and other natural-like elements:


Again, we can see in the center our first couple of finished off vines. Having checked our work, we can go ahead and add the rest:


Alright, with all of our vines finished, this completes the freehand pattern for the outside of the cloak (whew). It's similar enough and related to the pattern on the inside of the cloak so that they harmonize together, but there are enough differences that it stands on its own too. This is important, because otherwise, all the freehand stuff could potentially clash together and just look like a jumble of unrelated stuff...


Coming into the home stretch now - the next and last element of our cloak is the yellow/golden border around the outside of the cloak. Here are the paints used for the border:

Once more from left to right:

• Mars Brown (Blockx) - This will be our shadow tone.
• Mars Yellow (Vasari) - As mentioned before.
• Cadmium Yellow Medium (Williamsburg Oils) - As mentioned before.
• Titanium White (Old Holland) - As mentioned before.

This is also a great set of colors for golden embroidery on uniforms, and for non-metallic gold. Painting the border will be a two part process - first putting in all the basic lights and shadows, and then the texture work. First let's put in the basic lights and shadows:


The entire border was given a basecoat of Mars Yellow, with just a tiny bit of white mixed into it. Next Mars brown was painted and blended into the shadow areas, and for our highlights, the Cadmium Yellow Medium with a little bit of Titanium White was blended in. The final highlights will be added when we put in our texture.

Once this is dry, we can add some texture to it. To add the texture, we'll be adding lots of small lines. The color of each line depends on where it's being added - if it's a shadow area, we'll be adding darker lines, and if it's a lighter area, we'll be adding lines that are brighter. Finally, in certain highlight areas, we'll add lines of pure Titanium White to give us our final highlights. Unfortunately I don't have any in progress photos of this process, but because it's tough to see, here is the finished result magnified at 250%:


For the very last step, we're going to add a black line between the border and the rest of the cloak:
(Pure Ivory Black was used for this):


And that's it - the entire cloak is completed and finished!! . Here are some shots of the finished cloak:








That was by far the largest and most involved element on the entire bust. It's nice to have it done and out of the way. The next post will focus on the big leather belt in the middle of his chest.

Thanks for reading!
-Phil

 

[NigelR]

Amazing! You can never have too much paisley........

 

[phil_h]

Hello Everybody,

I don't normally have time to post two in a row, but here we go !

As mentioned, this post will cover the big leather belt in the front of his chest. It is also the predominant element in the entire chest area, so I'd like to make it really stand out. Lets see what we can do to make this happen.

Here are the paints used for the leather:


From left to right we have:

• Mars Brown (Blockx) - This is a dark brown with a reddish under-tone. It's also pretty opaque.
• Ivory Black (Williamsburg Oils) - This will be used to deepen shadows.
• Mars Orange (Williamsburg Oils) - A very dark orange - this will be our base tone. I really like this as a color for leather elements.
• Mars Yellow Light (Williamsburg Oils) - A light yellow ochre color but with the opacity gained from it using a synthetic mars pigment.
• Warm Yellow Light (Michael Harding) - Will be used for highlights.

For our leather elements (as with many other kinds of elements), this boils down to a two part process. The first process involves putting in all of our light and shadow areas on the element. The second process is to add any wanted textures, edge highlights, and other details that will sit on top of the more global highlights/shadows we applied in the first step. The big leather strap will provide a great example of how this approach works in practice.

One thing to note is that as mentioned, this element is very prominent and in the front and center of the bust. We'll do two things to really make it stand out:

• Really push the contrast between the shadows and highlights - we're going to go from almost totally black to almost pure white. The trick is to do this and still make it all look natural and harmonious.
• Add tons of texture and weathering. This is going to really add depth and realism, which for an element as prominent as this, will really help give it some flair and stand out.

Oh, and this will be a nice break from having to freehand a bunch of stuff too .

Lets get onto the actual painting. First well, basecoat the belt using Mars Orange with just a tiny bit of Mars Brown mixed into it:



Next we'll mix our Mars Brown and Ivory Black together and block in our shadows like such:



With the big shadow area at the bottom being the most prominent and easiest to see. Next we'll blend them in:


An important thing here is that we barely blended them in, they're not as smooth as the blending we might do with cloth elements for example. This is done because it will help make the texture work stand out a little bit more.

Now we'll block in our first highlights. We'll just use pure Mar Yellow Light for this:


Let's blend them in:


Now that our shadows and first highlights in place, we can get a really good feel for what we're working towards and if it's working. This is where we'd stop, re-assess and make any changes if necessary. Since everything looks good so far, our next step is to push the contrast a little further and add some more highlights:


These second highlights were made by mixing some of the Warm Light Yellow into the Mars Yellow and then applying them to a smaller area inside each of the first highlight areas. With this finished, we've completed the first part of the process, and all of our global shadows and highlights are in. Before moving on, we need to let all of this work dry.

Moving onto the second step, we're going to add all of our texture/weathering. This will consist of adding very small fine lines perpendicular to the edges (very similar to the cloaks border discussed in the prior post). We'll also be adding some edge highlights and some small scratches in various places along the belt.

The key thing to keep in mind is that we'll constantly need to change the colors of the lines, scratches and edge highlighting we do in order to respect our global highlighting scheme. This basically means that when working in shadow areas, we'll be using darker colors, and moving onto brighter colors as we move into our highlight areas. This will really help things to look natural.

Unfortunately, I only have a pic of the completed process:


It's this step that really makes things come alive I think. Another really important part of this process was that there was another highlight added using pure Warm Light Yellow. However, unlike the highlights we made in the first part, this highlight was made by applying tiny lines of the color where we wanted the highlight to appear. So in other words, we used the texturing process itself to create the final highlights. This finished up the leather strap. Let's move onto the buckles.

The following paints where used for the metal buckles:


We have:

• Iridescent Bronze (Williamsburg Oils) - We'll be using this as our mid-tone and base coat.
• Classic Gold (Schmincke Norma) - This is will be our primary highlight tone. It's a rich yellow gold color.
• Iridescent White (Winsor & Newton) - This will be used just for our highest highlights and reflex lights.
• Not pictured - French Burnt Umber (Williamsburg Oils) - This will be used for some shading.

First, we'll basecoat all the buckles using the Iridescent Bronze:


Next we'll highlight with the Classic Gold (this step is a little hard to see):


After all this dries, we'll go ahead and reapply the Classic Gold which will serve as a second highlight:


Next, there are some details that need to be picked out and cleaned up - specifically the engravings in the metal piece at the bottom middle, and the inlays in the top buckle. The engravings were detailed out with the French Burnt Umber, and some additional shadows were added using the same color:


If you look at the pic compared to the pic above, you should see that the details are much crisper. To finish off our leather and buckles, we're going to add some final highlights using pure Iridescent White, and do a little black lining around the belts and buckles. In addition, the hanging leather ties were painted as well using the same palette and approach as the strap. Here is the entire element finished:


Since some of this can be a little hard to see, here is the a detail cut-out of the photo above blown up to 250%:


Hopefully you'll agree that by pushing the contrast and adding a lot of texture/weathering, we made this stand out in the way we wanted.
That's it for this post. Next we're going to be painting the shield that is strapped to his back.

Thanks for reading!
-Phil

 

[Briggsy]

The outer cloak was great but the way you did the belt was even better as for me it's an area I struggle with. Even switching the method to acrylics will work well.

Simon