Paint Over Lunch - Learning Sketch Style

[CreganTur]

Ever since I saw the Painting Buddah video forRed Chaos Armor, I've wanted to try it.

This St. Mark mini has been sitting in my collection since my very first CMON Expo 3 years ago, and I figured it would be the perfect piece to try this out on. So, after eating quickly I setup my mobile painting station in the breakroom where I work and got to sketching.

I'm really happy with how it's gone so far, but I realized I need to bring my little pre-mixed bottle of flow improver for the white. I'm using an airbrush white- some random manufacturer Hobby Lobby carries. It's good, but dries a tad too quickly.

Once I get everything done, the robo-drake will get glazes of red for the armor.

 

[KruleBear]

Cool, I like what I see so far.

 

[CreganTur]

Remembered to pack up my flow improver before heading to work today, which helped. I think the real issue with this white paint is just that it's pre-mixed for airbrushing, so it's additives are different than the normal Vallejo/other manufacturers I use. I only picked this paint because I've got a ton of it. And it will work perfectly for this learning project.

I went back over a number of the panels to try and increase the contrast, as well as smooth it out a bit. I feel like I'm starting to get the hang of this.

 

[Scherdy]

Oh man, I'm excited for this...a painter I really love doing a model that I've been excited to paint but intimidated to start for over a year doing sketch style that is a ton of fun to do! I got to take a class on it from Matt DiPietro and it really is a nice change of process to paint! I hope you get more lunch breaks than normal

 

[Torn blue sky]

Looking great! Tempted to give that style a bash myself...
On the topic of lunch breaks, make me your king and i'll make sure you have 5. I am not trying to indoctrinate you. At all. Now, look into my eyes....

 

[CreganTur]

Well, unfortunately I've got an errand to run today that's going to eat up my lunch break. But, I do get to have lunch with my wife, so that makes up for it in my book.

If I can convince myself not to play Heroes of the Storm with my friends for 2 hours before bed tonight, then I might get some extra painting in.

@Torn Blue Sky: sorry, I've got a daughter. That develops immunity to eye-based mind-affecting spells

 

[Coyotebreaks]

thats looking good, I've just spent the evening watching that painting tutorial, very interesting technique, worth learning it seams, and this is a great model to start by the looks of things.

 

[CreganTur]

Haven't been able to paint on my lunch break the past couple of days, but was happily able to get back to it today!

I switched off using the airbrush paint and am now using a white from Army Painter, which is much easier to work with. Only downside is that a tiny ball of paint likes to dry on the tip of my brush, so lots of extra cleanings are required.

Tonight I'm going to carefully drybrush the edges of the myriad tiny plates beneath the neck of this creature. This will allow me to define them so I can see them easier.

 

[CreganTur]

The sketching is nearly complete!

Worked a lot over the weekend, because I'm really excited to start laying in the color. Drybrushing white on the tiny neck scales made it much easier to work on them. I'm going to hit the brightest spots with some titanium white tonight.

One side has much higher value than the other. The lower value side will get a cooler mix of colors, as the main light source is coming nearly horizontally to the high value side.

Now I'm trying to plan out the colors I want to use. From the beginning I've wanted the main scales of the robo-lizard to be red, so I'm thinking about a red, purple, and blue palette, but I'm not set on that, yet. I've got a plan for the cape, which will be white and blue, but there will be some special techniques involved to make it striking.

 

[CreganTur]

Last night I finished up the sketch, which means now I get to play with color!

I've known since the beginning of this project that I've wanted the armor of the robo-lizard to be mostly red, which I have done a little shading on in some areas. I'm just not certain what other colors I want to use, so I'm open to suggestions if anyone wants to share.

The only other thing that's certain is that the rider's cloak is going to use blue and white.

 

[Lone Lemming]

May I suggest lime green, fluo green or yellow eyes as spot color?

 

[CreganTur]

Been working on my final color choices for the robo-lizard. Feels like I've lost a lot of contrast. Part of that is because I think I used too much white overall and didn't enforce broad contrast on each element. So I'll have to work to fix that using more standard techniques.