54mm Samurai coat work, leg armour and hair

54mm Samurai

Most of my painting this week was on the kids go-cart painting “go fast flames” on the side with enamel paints and my old Paasche model H airbrush.  I learnt that it is much better to mask an area and then cut out a pattern with a hobby knife (which means you get nice smooth curves) than try and mask out a pattern with tape (which results in odd dead straight sections and wobbly curves).   Enamel paints are lovely in that you have ages for them to dry and can clean up any rough bits with some white spirit and a cloth.

On the samurai front I did some more work on the purple coat and tried to smooth out the transitions a bit more especially around the top of the coat where the highlights get more extreme and go towards white/pink.  I’m happy with the coat but will need to do some more work on it once the arms are attached and I can see where any extra shadows are needed.

The leg armour was next.  Seeing that these are very much in shadow under the armour skirt I started with a base of VMC Hull Red and shaded down with VMC German black/brown and a hint of VMC Midnight Blue.  This is because things get bluer as the light fades at dusk.  So for things in shade you normally add blue to the mix.  This is an area I need a lot more skill in.  I’m still in the simple school of colour mixing.  I notice when watching painting tutorials experienced painters mix a wide range of colours when highlighting and shading.  Half the time I’m questioning why, as the colour added can be totally different from the base colour.  Much learning needed there.

Better blends on the coat

For the leg armour highlights rather than go with the purple I used VMC Flat Yellow to try and give a more sun faded/worn look to the raised vertical slats on the armour.  That worked out ok.

Finally started (again) on the horse hair “hair” on the helmet.  I’m keeping with a brownish shade to keep things away from the land of grey scale that I tend to end up in when painting black/grey items.  I did try and highlight with a bit of yellow but the blue in the grey paint started to make things green.  So I need to try countering this by adding red.

This reminds me of painting books I read where grey is always mixed from colour opposites and black is always mixed from the three primaries instead of a pre-created (i.e. from the tube) grey or black.  I’m starting to see where this could be of value.