Ral Partha Death Dealer

I took a few days off this week as I just wasn’t in the head space for painting.  I find ever couple of months there will be a week were I’m just not interested in the actual process of painting.  One night I tried and 5 minutes later gave up.  Good news is I got to watch the movie “Red Dragon” again.  I think the real reason was that I was fearing starting on a new figure so subconsciously avoiding the task.  Probably needed some more teddy bear hugs.

Five coats of paint later...

However Thursday/Friday I was feeling the mojo again and did some more trials on my practice horse.  Part of this was from re-reading Shepard Paine’s “Building and painting scale figures” which includes a nice section on horses.  I learnt so much from those few pages on horses and markings that it made me realise how bad I am at seeing things in real life.  I’ve seen hundreds of horses in my life but couldn’t tell you what body colours go with what leg markings, etc.  So after the quick read and few hours of horse pictures from the net gave me a clearer idea of what real horses look like.  So research pays off, even on subjects that are totally familiar.

I pretty much have given up on using the airbrush and just went for a light/dark almost sketching process and after an hour or so was getting some good results.  I repainted (again) my trial horse and went to an extreme highlight on the flanks and neck of almost pure bright yellow to try and emulate the sunlight look of the Death Dealer painting.  I ended up with tide marks and spots but I had achieved the result of near black under the belly to near yellow on the top of the horse.  Time for the real thing.

In a painting lesson on glazing from Mark Soley he mentioned that you should start at approx 75% lightness as your base colour rather than starting at a mid colour base as normal.  It’s easier to get darker with glazes than get lighter.  Finally took that advice and although I want the lower sections of the horse be quite dark went for a lighter colour.  This made the lighter glazes easier as I needed to do less of them to get that sun yellow highlights.  After all black covers pretty well, yellow not so much.  Also I didn’t want to end up with a black horse with no tonal variation.

My dark to light combo was

Black
Black + VMA Yellow Olive + VMC Dark Sea Blue + base
3 parts VMA Burnt Umber + 1 part VMC German Pale Brown - Base
VMC Brown Sand + Base
VMC Iraqi Sand + previous
VMC Flat Yellow + previous

The pale rider

This results in near black (looks slightly purple) under the horse, dark brown on the sides to a very pale yellow brown on the top.  The legs of the horse are quite muscular so I have been using that muscle definition to try and pop some contrast a bit more.

VMC Dark Sea Blue is a new colour I picked up after seeing (via youtube) Ben Komets use it a lot.  Pretty much Paynes grey so I can see why he likes it.  I was using VGC Night Blue for the shading but that is quite intense and makes things very blue.  So looking forward to some more trials with Dark Sea Blue.

I trialled some pale fetlocks on my test horse and they are looking ok.  It makes the horse look a heck load better than the 28mm gaming “brown horse, black hooves” look.  One of those things that without them the horse doesn’t look quite right, but you can’t say why.  However once done you immediately think “oh, that looks much better”.

So more horse next week with the fetlocks, mane, tail and tack to be done.  Should give me some time to figure our how to paint the figure.