Friday, January 4, 2013

Mantis demonette from Raging Heroes: a step by step fleshtone


While I try to work out all the technical snags of the painting DVD kickstarter, I decided to go ahead with something I have more control of... painting!

This is actually a practice piece for a multi-part set of non-human flesh tone DVD's. The figure is from the Raging Heroes line.  A similar figure to this will be used to create the actual DVD.

I started this out by mixing a bit of pink with a greyish white for the flesh.  The claws and lower legs were painted with the pink and Reaper ash brown.


More of the pink is mixed in with the original flesh tone to lighten it.  


I mixed in some very pale elf flesh into that mix to lighten it further.


This all follows the 'shaded basecoat' principle, as you will see in the subsequent steps.  My goal was to set up my darker glazes.


Starting with the legs, I have a few glaze colors at the ready.  A violet, a dark blue, and a black.  The first glaze is a watered down violet, starting at the top of the section I want to shade.  As I move further down, the dark blue is mixed with the violet.  The black is added when I reach the feet, since I want that to be a bit warmer.


The same process is done on the claws.  I tried to leave the ends of them a little lighter, as I am considering putting a little bit of blood splatter on them.


This image shows that I treated the head the same way, as well as the little horns on the back.

I have also begun to work back into my middle tones at this point.  I mixed in some of my pink color with the dark glazes.  This is a favorite little trick of mine.  I end up with a semi-transparent lighter color.  This can be very helpful for subtle transitions!


Tomorrow I will show the shading of the flesh, as well as the freehand work.

Again, this is a practice run for one of the initial DVD's.  By practicing this a few times, I will be able to pass along more information in the relatively compressed time frame of 100 minutes :-)





4 comments:

  1. Wow! You can tell how good an artist is when they have to highlight broad smooth surfaces with realistic highlights. I really struggle with getting a nice even smooth highlight on the female form. Even thinning my paints I still have trouble making it look natural. How do you keep it from being too "cartoon-y"?

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    1. Thanks! :-) I think there might be a few things. First, I am painting my flesh as if I were painting it in 2D, where I work on all the different surfaces at the same time. This gives me a crucial color/value comparison.

      When I used to paint only one small section of the figure at a time, some areas became to bright, or the highlights didn't quite match the rest of the figure.

      Also, by working in this way, I can use some of my flesh tone mix on other areas to highlight it, making things more cohesive. I work with those bigger brushes, as you know, and this lets me work more wet into wet. That can be a huge help!

      The bigger brushes take some getting used to if you have not done that before. However, I was a watercolor artist long before painting minis, so it was actually more natural for me.

      I hope all these ramblings make sense! I am really hoping to get past these technical hurdles with the filming so people can see that actual brush strokes!

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    2. Looks like I've go some practice to do then. I really want to have it down before I go and purchase really nice stuff from Raging Heroes, Kingdom Death, Freebooter, Reaper, etc. So many minis out there that I want to paint; most of which came to my awareness by seeing minis on this blog so thanks for expanding my horizons BTW. Although, my wallet is sending hate daggers your way ;)

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    3. Gee, you have to figure I have had thousands of opportunities to practice these techniques, so never be hard on yourself! :-)

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