Greg\'s WIP\'s - help is always appreciated

[Greg Ellis]

I spent my entire painting session last night working exclusively on faces.

It\'s not something I\'m very good at, and I find the eyes especially difficult to do.

Keeping in mind that these photos are several times actual size, and I\'m still learning how to paint properly, what do you think?

What would you do to make these better?

Thanks!

Sorry about the blur on some shots, I was in a hurry; no tripod for these.

The Cleric (reminds me of Rudy Sarzo for some reason):

The Dwarf:

The Boy:

 

[Larre]

it looks good, you have really nice skin tones! I think you should try to thin your paints a bit when you paint faces. it looks a bit messy atm.

but other than that it looks great!

// Larre

 

[Fists of mortis]

I think the eyes are pretty good actually, the easiest way to paint them is to add the white when the face is still black undercoated or the other way round.

Experiment with different colour glazes, browns and purples work well with a light skin tone and try to examine real life faces too. For your dwarf your highlights should go up to a light brown colour as they do in real life

Hope to see some more

 

[marineboy]

Good shading, but I agree 100 with FoM about the glazes.

Inks mixed with a glaze medium (Vallejo) work for me as far as transparency goes...tints the flesh, very little darkening of the underlying coats.

 

[Gilvan Blight]

I\'m horrible at faces, so take my suggestions as you wish.

For the cleric, the tranistion from dark to light seems to abrupt. Either your dark is too dark of you need more transitional layers between the two. The darkest colour almost looks like an outline in a cartoon, and not shading.

The Dwarf looks excellent, I like the darker skin tone, but with that receeding hairline his forehead should be much brighter, as bright as his nose.

The boy is the best of the bunch. Some darklining around the eyes (I know I couldn\'t do it) would defintely help).

Looking at the boy and the cleric again and it looks like you missed the eyebrows.

 

[Greg Ellis]

Thanks everyone!

FoM, the eyes only look good because I kept going back and re-doing them until I got lucky. I guess with practice this might get easier.

For those mentioning glazes - do you mean all over? Or just in specific spots?

Is the goal to add complexity to the skin tones? I\'ve never tried that. How do you choose your ink colours? Is it a cold colours/warm colours thing?

I\'m accustomed to \"washing\" just to darken crevices etc. but I\'m guessing that is NOT what you\'re talking about.

Good idea about studying the real thing - thanks for that.

 

[Fists of mortis]

A glaze is the same as a wash but it is more watered down, these means you may need to apply the glaze a number of times to get an effect, but this is more subtle and blended in than a wash.

For a \'cold\' model like your cleric\'s face seems to be, I would go for a dark purple glaze. Just add it to underneath the cheekbones, under the nose and around the hairline to really define those features.

The boy could do with medium-dark brown glazes that would help make the face look more realistic

 

[Starks333]

ALl you need to look at is this:
Spanish Forums Tut

you just apply layers of glazes and washes wherever you need, when you cover an area, you are tinting or affecting whats under, when you are picking out spots you are shading/highlighting

as to inks, i never use inks(only for metallics and maybe mixing, but very rarely)

This is my recent work, as you can see theres colour in the skin...now this doesnt mean you have to go out and use red and purple all the time, this is just one of 748912748901s of skintones possible

yellow, blue, red, green, purple, brown, orange, pink(or rose) all work for skin tones in different degrees and deliver different messages

the best way to learn, is look at pictures(painted models is probably much easier) and see where shadows and colour usually is, then try applying it

my model was done solely using washes and glazes, basecoats were heavy washes applied in layers

Starks

 

[Greg Ellis]

Working on robes now...

I did some work on the cleric\'s robe. It looks a bit funny to me, like I\'m pushing shadows and highlights into places that they don\'t belong.

Any insight? Or is this really how it\'s supposed to look?

 

[Manus]

It looks fairly OK, highlighted and shadowed areas work for me, but I think I would break up that final highlight so the top/lightest color doesn\'t run all along the folds but only on the really highpoints and/or edges. Maybe a further highlight color would do that trick. Again a bit more thinning of paints and then give it two or three extra layers instead.

 

[Greg Ellis]

I read something yesterday that reminded about the idea of darkening colours by adding a touch of the complimentary colour, rather than adding black or a deeper shade of the same colour.

I grabbed a Grick (a D&D monster; this is a WOTC fig from about 1999 or 2000) off my \"in progress\" pile to try it out (and to practise mixing, brush control, etc.).

Here\'s the result so far. Yes, pretty sloppy. :redface:

I was working mostly on the colour side of things, and testing my skill at layering up progressive shades. Note that all colours in the palette (including the browns) are mixed from one red, one green, and one yellow.

One problem I ran into here was that if I thinned the paint too far (to make it transparent), it tended to work out like a wash, flowing across the surface and sinking into the crevices. You can see some of that happening on the highest (yellowish) highlights.

And when I didn\'t thin the paint enough, it came out too opaque.

I\'m not sure how to fix all that. If I wipe off the brush before touching it to the mini, the result comes out more like drybrushing, and I don\'t want that dusty look.

I was thinning with Liquitex Matte Medium and water for this experiment, with a touch of Future on the deeper colours only.

I\'m going to try to find a better glazing medium at the art store later today.

Any comments or advice are (as always) much appreciated.

 

[Greg Ellis]

I did a bit of work on the dwarf as well, on the yellow and blue tones.

Note that I\'m painting over top of a prior attempt, and the way it\'s coming out all lumpy and bumpy, I\'m considering that maybe I should strip the mini and start fresh.

How do you like the armour and the yellow fabric so far?

 

[Greg Ellis]

I\'ve been getting a bit frustrated with the poorly thinned lumpy paint I\'ve been painting on top of, so I\'ve prepped a few brand new figs to see if things get better with a fresh start.

Note that these pics are deliberately poor - I\'ve shot with a top light only, and cranked up the contrast, to help me see where the shadows and highlights need to go.

Here\'s another shadow warrior, a wizard from a small box of GW figs, and the gang of pirates I built from an Empire Militia sprue.

I need to wait a bit for the green stuff to dry, then I\'ll get some primer on these and start painting.

 

[Greg Ellis]

I got some primer on these, painted the eyes, and laid down a base colour for each face. The eyes aren\'t exactly perfect, but they\'re a lot better than the stuff in my current gallery.

I had some trouble with paint drying out on the palette before I was finished. I\'ll have to think about adding an extender.

Any comments or questions, fire away!

 

[Greg Ellis]

No time for more painting yet, but I did manage to sketch out the colour schemes for the wizard and the pirates.

Any input on the colours?

 

[uberdark]

to achieve the proper viscosity add some pva glue to your paints. this should put the ink where it needs to be.

 

[Greg Ellis]

Well, I finally got a chance to spend some time painting last night, and I focussed on the wizard.

I see now that I should have looked back over my plans - for some reason I was following an earlier version of the colour scheme. I\'ll have to think about whether to go back and switch it.

The face didn\'t go as well as I was hoping. I was custom mixing tones from burnt umber and mocha, with a touch of medium fleshtone as I worked up. The first couple of layers went on exactly as I wanted and dried almost invisible, but as I started to add in the fleshtone, the paint suddenly started to dry opaque, with harsh transitions vs. the previous coats. I let it dry for a while and then went all over with a 50/50 mix of GW flesh wash and water to smooth it out. Then I went back over the deepest shadows, first with the flesh wash and then with diluted purple ink. Wow, the purple is a lot stronger than I was expecting.

There\'s lots left to do on the face, but I think I need to get the hair, mustache, eyebrows and beard started to understand how the remainder of the face work is going to pan out.

===

GW mithril silver is awesome stuff! The consistency is perfect, and even when thinned considerably it still flows and covers extremely well, and dries remarkably smooth.

I used it three times here, mixed with bright green and a touch of bright red to do the metallic dragon\'s head and the decoration on the sword, mixed with quite a lot of black to do the sword blade, and then mixed with just a bit of black and thinned quite a lot to try a highlight on the skyward portions of the sword blade.

I noticed a mold line that I had missed on the under portion of the dragon\'s crest. I\'m still debating whether to clean it now and try to reproduce the paint colour, or just leave it and learn for next time.

The shading on the dragon\'s head was hit and miss. I tried dark green ink with Future solution first, but that was too bright. I dulled it down with some red ink, and added some glaze medium. That made it darker and a bit stickier, but still not really deep enough yet after several coats. I\'ll have to keep working on that.

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The GW dwarf bronze is a bit stranger - it didn\'t cover nearly as well as well as the silver, once I had thinned it down. It\'s an older pot with a screw top and had pretty much \"gelled\" in the pot. I\'m not sure if it\'s bad or not. I did a second coat and it seemed to work out fine. Wow, that stuff shines a lot more than I was expecting. I tried to shade it with a mix of black and brown ink with some glazing medium and water, but had a very difficult time trying to get it to stay where I wanted it. I\'ll have to work on the mix for that.

The wedgewood blue was absolutely a joy to paint with. I added 2 little drops of 20% Future solution, then thinned with pure water until it flowed the way I wanted. 2 coats to cover the primer.

===

The orange was another story. This is a GW paint, blazing orange. I thinned with water and just a touch of the Liquitex glaze medium. I had to use three coats in some places, just to get a partial coverage. Were I to do it again, I would paint white over the primer first. I think I\'ll do that for the yellow sections coming up.

Any thoughts or opinions? Any hints or tips that you think might help? Please let me hear them.

 

[Larre]

something that might help you in the future is this tip... paint from the inside out. so you paint the skin first. and then the cloth. and then the details ^^

it looks good btw

I would just say that you should paint the bow brown insted of beige.

// Larre

 

[gaspode]

The orange looks good and bright on the robes. The 3 caots may have been time consuming, but the end product looks very good.

I use a white spray primer, but even with that I end up painting a thin white \'undercoat\' before I do colours such as orange, red or yellow as it helps the first coat to sit a bit better. Saying that, i usually tend to go for 2 or 3 thin coats of the base colour over that.

As for the skin on the wizard, I hate skin, its a bane of my life, but I have seen some good articles in the articles section. One thing I have tried is a little purple ink and GW flesh wash mixed together. This seems to come out quite well on models, but there are times when I can never seem to get the mix right and I end up screwing the model up. I think you may want another highlight or so on the wizads flesh and this should really bring out the colours in his face.

One thing you might want to do is to put a thin black line around the edge of the white on the eye. At the moment they eye looks like its sitting outwith the face and a little black edging to it should recess it a little. I usually paint eyes by painting them completely black to begin with and use two white dots to pick out the \'whites\' of the eye.

Other than that though your models are coming on a treat! Its good to see another painter who is in the middle of painting as many models at one time as me

 

[tide of khorne]

Everything is looking good and i like the greenish gold very much.
keep it up.