"Skin in the Game" - The Vulture - Part 2 - Skin, Hair

There's many a man hath more hair than wit. 

- Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors

Hello again, and welcome back to The Art of Caesura!

We are on the second part of my coverage of my painting competition piece: skin and hair. 

Just like last week, there is a lot to cover, so grab some refreshments, and let's tuck in!

The above picture is where we're going to end up today, but let's see how we'll get there. 

I started by painting all of the skin areas with Bugman's Glow, this gave a nice, deep, fairly saturated base to work from. In retrospect, I think I could have pushed this base coat even further (going in to a deeper more saturated colour in increase contrast). 

With the base coat down, I used a mixture of Bugman's Glow, Cadian Fleshtone and Wraithbone for highlights and I started with the arms - leaving the face for later.  

I then further highlighted with just Cadian Fleshtone mixed with Wraithbone.

With all of the highlights brushed in, I gave a little puff through the airbrush of my highlight colour, just to blend my brush work together more smoothly and ease the transitions. 

With my airbrush still set up and the model still masked off, it was now time to re-introduce some shadow. I sprayed Contrast Fyreslayer from below for this. 

To finish off the arms, I used my highlight mix to carefully paint on the veins. 

With the arms complete, I moved on to his grizzled face; first blocking in the highlight areas with Cadian Fleshtone. 

I then smoothed the transitions with a mix of Bugman's Glow and Cadian Fleshtone. 

At this early stage of the face, I decided to paint his eye - so that if I made any mistakes, they would be easy to remedy while painting the rest of the face. 

I used an off-white (Wraithbone) for the sclera, so as not to have it too stark. 

And for the iris I used a new colour from the John Blanche paint set: Blanched Berry. Why did I paint his iris burgundy, I hear you ask with bemusement? One reason was to catch some of the warm tones of the OSL from his lighter, but the real reason is that while I was painting this guy, I was reading a compendium of Astra Militarum short stories which heavily featured the character Lord Castellan Ursarkar Creed. Creed is a bad ass from the planet Cadia and the more I painted this guy, the more I thought that this could be Creed. I was even tempted to freehand "Creed" across the back of his jacket, but I ran out of gumption. Anyway, in the lore, people from Cadia have a mutation which causes them to have purple irises. So this was a fun little nod to the lore. 

I would end up re-centring the iris later in the process, but it was good to get it in to give his face a sense of focus. 

I used my previous highlight mix to start highlighting up the central part of his face. I used this step to accentuate the craggy wrinkles of his weathered face. 

And with the highlights in, I began to blend them using Cadian Fleshtone. I should reiterate that the OSL that I had painted on the right side of his face was just a placeholder, and at this step I was happily painting over it using the fleshtone mixes. I would go back and re-establish the OSL at a later stage. 

Now, onto the hair! An all-over coat of a mix of Abaddon Black and Dawnstone gave a nice deep base coat and really changed the look of the face. 

Then I just added more and more Dawnstone to the mix over successive layers. The trick to the hair was to keep the correct paint consistency (the typical description of, "the consistency of milk" is apt here) and keep a nice fine tip on the brush, and mostly ignore the sculpted hair details. I was pulling my brushstrokes in a straight line from front to back but not trying to line up with the sculpted hair strands. 

As an aside, I wrapped him in cling film (saran wrap) so that my grubby paws wouldn't rub off the paint on the armour that I had painstakingly completed. This worked surprisingly well!

Once I got up to pure Dawnstone, I started to add Ice Yellow in order to keep pushing the highlights. 

Ice Yellow is a special colour that all hobbyests should have in their armamentarium. It is a very light, desaturated yellow, but it has a bit of fluorescent pigment in it, which isn't consciously visible, but really lets it punch above its weight in terms of its ability to act as a highlight. 

I also used a bit of Ice Yellow in my final highlights of his face, especially around his scar, to create more of a visual connection between his hair and face. 

To be honest, I think the hair is one of the elements of this model that I am most happy with. 

And with the skin and hair complete (as you can see above), we only had the overcoat and details left to do! Tune in next week to The Art of Caesura for those. 

Reading: 100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Watching: Anaconda (2025) 

Next Week: 

Coat, Details and Plinth