Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Vestal Flesh tone experiment #1 : Dark Elf


With the lava base complete, it was time to get down to some flesh tones!  For this experiment, I wanted to try out a variation of the usual Dark Elf lightflesh/black hair combo.

The flesh is not as bright as you usually see in GW publications.  I wanted this to be a little darker, so that I could reflect a bit more of the lava glow in it.

These Vestals will be the subject of numerous painting DVD's in our Kickstarter program.

I used a blue/black mix to establish the darks of the hair and the armor...


The armor was a mix of snakebite leather and that blue/black.


I started to 'flesh out' the flesh tone by using a watered down Reare Ashen Brown.  This would help me establish where the darks would be.  The hair had a lightening color of blue/black and bright sky blue.  That same color is also applied to parts of the weapons.


I mixed a little bit of Vallejo brown rose with the ashen brown, which made my warmest color.  I also mixed a bit of lavender in with this.  I used flow improver to keep the colors in a better state for mixing on the figure. 


I took my panzer aces highlight green and mixed that with the more rosy flesh tone.  That cooled down the surfaces facing away from the lava, which would be very important!  This would become my highlight tone as well.  So, I kept mixing more of the highlight green into that shade.


I mixed a space wolves grey into that color to further lighten it.  You can see that I did some more work on the armor as well.  These flesh colors were mixed in with the snakebite leather to make it lighter.


I get more definition on the armor by mixing a little yellow in that mix.  It is surprisingly cool by comparison, which is good.  I am also working on the darker shades of the weapons.  I put some glowing eyes on her for fun, and to tie in with the lava effect!


Final highlights are picked out on the weapons, the armor and the hair.  I went back in with some dark purple in the shadow sections of the hair for a little contrast.  That same color was thinned down and used for the darkest shades of the swords as well.


Tomorrow I will post the finished images!!


5 comments:

  1. Amazing color scheme. How do you do to paint so fast and so well? How do you blend the colors?

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    1. Thanks for the kind words! A big reason for the faster paint times is that I have been painting minis 7 days a week for 10-16 hours a day ;-)

      If you check out some of the how to articles, that will give you a pretty good idea of how I paint. There are a bunch on the top bar, but there are other ones that you can find in each army category, such as the tomb kings or the lizardmen, etc.

      You will see that I use a fairly large brush, and work quickly. If I also use a glaze medium, I can almost blend wet into wet, which is fun!

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  2. lovely, absolutely amazing. I have a question about how YOU use flow improver... I mean, do you add it to your colours as you go, or use it to moisten your brush on the move etc??

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    1. When I used the flow improver, it is usually have a bit of it out on the palette. Then I can pick some up with the brush and ad it to the paint (some paints don't need as much flow improver...)

      I will do the same thing with my glaze medium. However, there are times where I just drop some right in with the paint... especially with the glaze medium!

      I hope that helps!

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