"The apparel oft proclaims the man"
- Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act I, Scene 3)
Hello one and all and welcome back to The Art of Caesura!
Fasten your seatbelts for another action-packed, mammoth post about my painting competition piece from a few weeks ago.
We're closing in on the home stretch now, having looked at painting the NMM breastplate, hair and skin. Today were going to look at ALL THE REST!
I started by painting the whole coat (inside and out) with a few thinned layers of Vallejo's Charred Brown.
Once the base coat was nice and smooth, I started the worst part of the whole painting process - and the part that I regret the most!
Using a mix of Vallejo's Charred Brown and Dark Fleshtone, I started stippling on teeny tiny dots ALL OVER the entire outside of the jacket. This was to provide a bit of texture.
Those past few photos literally took a week of painting time! And if you think it's hard to see in the photos above, imagine how it looks under normal lighting - INVISIBLE!!
I stubbornly persevered, and, using a mix of Dark Fleshtone and Barbarian Flesh, I continued the process, but only on the raised areas (shoulders, folds, creases).
Can you see the difference? That's good, because I can't! Anyway, my main beef with this process is that it was so incredibly labour intensive and gave such minor pay-off. Shane (who won the painting competition), told me that he sponged the texture on his jacket in less than an hour - and it ended up looking at least as good as mine! Grrr...
Anyway, I continued the process with straight Barbarian Flesh - again on the more raised areas, and hallelujah, you can finally see a difference!
After a week and a half (literally) I had completed the stippling (praise be) and I wanted to draw it all together and bring a bit more saturation back into it, so I used another new colour from the John Blanche paint set: Warm Skin Shade.
This was a bit of a mistake. The idea was right, but I should have gone with something that I have a lot of experience with - like Seraphim Sepia - because this wash (even after having extensively shaken it) left a weird patchy finish - a bit glossy in some areas, and less so in others. So then I had to use an all over (the jacket) satin varnish to re-unify the finishes. It was a bit of unnecessary faff.
Okay, let's leave the trials and tribulations of painting the foundation of the jacket behind us and start seeing progress!
I used a mix of Ushabti Bone and Averland Sunset to come in and aggressively delineate where the leather jacket was getting very worn and the leather was beginning to crack.
I'm really happy with how that stage turned out, it really gives the jacket a nice worn, well-lived-in look.
Next up, I mixed Dark Fleshtone and Wraithbone to paint long squiggly lines along the top of the shoulders and in areas where the leather would crease as opposed to crack.
AAaaand...with a huge sigh of relief, the outside of the jacket was done! Onto the inside!
I base coated the whole lining of the jacket with a mix of Dark Fleshtone and Barbarian Flesh.
I then used diluted Barbarian Flesh on its own to start adding a subtle texture to the lining. This was a different texture than the outside of the jacket to show a different material - fleece or wool.
I began to add Rakarth Flesh to the Barbarian Flesh to continue the plush texture. Rather than traditional stippling, as I had done on the outside of the jacket, I thinned the paint a bit more and blobbed it on - keeping the strokes small, but larger than on the outside of the jacket, I also let the splodges merge together to give a wool-like texture.
Looking back now, I probably could have given a light glaze of a colour like Rakarth Flesh (though not that specific colour, because it does not glaze nicely at all and separates at the drop of a hat) over the raised areas of the lining to make it look less "dotty".
Anyway, jacket done. Celebrations abound!
Comparatively, the belt and holster took no time at all, I think I painted each of them in one session each. Starting from the Charred Brown undercoat, I used a mix of Charred Brown and Sunburst Ochre (also from the John Blanche paint set) to paint random scratchy lines on the holster and belt, building the up with more and more Sunburst Ochre.
Whhooooweeee!! If you just sit back and let your eyes kind of rest in the centre of the photo above you can really see all the immense textures. I think they're really coming together and selling the different materials. Onwards!
I went back to my original NMM mix to paint the belt buckle, metal parts of the gun, button on the holster, buttons on the jacket, and the ring on his left hand.
These areas were tiny so I kept the contrast very high to sell the metallic gleam and not have them look muddy.
It was as this point that I started to re-establish the OSL.
I resprayed the OSL areas with white, this time Dead White - rather than my white ink. I find Dead White is much easier to clean out of my airbrush.
Obviously this was nerve-wracking; I was spraying over areas that I had pretty much completed - the face and armour where his cigar would reflect.
I began working in the fiery glow with Hot Orange (which is much more of a thin yellow).
And then a mix of Hot Orange and Sunburst Ochre for around the edges of the OSL.
I painted his eyepatch with a mix of Charred Brown and Ironclad Grey and mixed in some Grey Seer for the highlights.
I came in with my hairy brush and cleaned up the face and upper armour - redefining areas that the airbrush had become muddled. I did this by mixing my OSL colours into my skin tones and applying them with intention.
And at a certain point I just had to decide that I was done. There was always more that could be done - further refinements, further building up of contrast etc, but I was happy with where he was. I have often heard of the diminishing returns stage of competition painting where you get to a stage where, once you reach a certain stage of completion with the model, you have to work harder and harder to achieve even small improvements. In the context of productivity and time management, this is referred to as the Pareto Principle (or the 80/20 rule), which specifically suggests that the first 20% of your effort typically accounts for 80% of the results, while the final 20% of the work - often consisting of polishing and minor details - consumes the remaining 80% of your time. James Clear talks about this in Atomic Habits, where the people who excel at things are often simply the ones who stuck with it when others dropped off. It's about managing the tedium and being able to keep putting loads of effort in even (and indeed, especially) when the excitement from the novelty has worn off.
Okay, pep talk over, onto the base. I 3D printed a plinth that I found online by WARRIOR3DPRINT which I felt perfectly captured the Gothic Warhammer aesthetic that I was going for. I had specifically mentioned in the suggested scoring sheet which I had placed next to the painting competition entries, that this was a painting competition and while bases or plinths could be used, they were not necessary.
From a black prime, I airbrushed Ironclad Grey from directly above - this drew in a colour that I had used extensively on the model itself to bring cohesion between the two.
I worked this up with Cold Grey...
...and then worried that it was getting too light and too grey, so I coated it all over with another new paint, Grimdark Shadow, from the John Blanche set. I wanted to keep the plinth dark, neutral and utilitarian - not drawing attention away from the painted bust.
This dulled things down enough and added just a hint of interest to the grey.
Then I was struck with the problem of how to stop the hollow base from falling over once I mounted him to it. For some reason, my mind went to filling the base with pennies (I have used coins to weigh-down models in the past). My wife had the ingenious idea of filling the base with sand, which I did, and it worked perfectly.
With the base filled with beach sand, I slapped some packing tape on the bottom, drilled a hole in the top...
...and inserted a segment of a wire clothe's hanger which I had sprayed black, that I had already been using to hold the model through parts of the painting process.
And with that, the entire competition piece was complete - a full 2 days before I needed to submit it!
Phew! This was another mammoth post, thanks for sticking with me, make sure to pop back next Friday when we'll look at all the photos of the finished piece, right here on The Art of Caesura!
Reading: 100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Listening: Mr.HmmmSooo's "Xenos Auxilla: A Mercenary's Guide to the Kroot Kindreds of the Eastern Fringe
Next Week:
All done!!
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