Violinist part 8

Repainting the base

Things kind of went to plan this week for once.  I redid the ground work and built up the area under the fence posts.  I also started painting the edges of the base.  Giving up on the stained wood look I repainted everything in matt black and then started the multiple layers of gloss black.  I find it takes 3-4 to get a decent finish from the gloss black I have.  The pond bricks got undercoated but are on hold until the edges are done.

Ground work prep colour done

On the figure I worked on the shirt, the tights, shoes and the jacket.  Still not sure on the green jacket but I think I will press on with the cloak before deciding for sure.

Progress at last

I had a lot of trouble with the highlights on the green.  I was making the jumps between layers much too large and the blends were not working at all.  My first colour chart was

base - VMC German Uniform + Coat d’arms Russian green
highlights - VGC Khaki and VMA Light Brown
shades - more Russian Green and VMC Dark Sea Blue.

I found the highlights just weren’t working at all.  For the highlights I instead tried used some yellow, a bit of Russian Green (to stop the green going to lime) and some VMC Dark Flesh (which despite the name is a very light flesh colour).  I’ve read of a lot of people using flesh colours as highlights.  I’m starting to see why as most flesh colours have some yellow and brown in them making them great for highlights.

Show some leg...

I also rediscovered my old Coat d’arms Dark Angel Green and used that as the shade colour with some black.  I need to leave the coat for awhile and come back to it later and make a final decision before I glue on the arms.

For the stockings my colours were

base - VGC Khaki + VMC Dark Flesh + VGC Bonewhite
highlights - glazes of the base with yellow, white, lighter flesh colours added
shades - glazes of base + browns

I was wanting the stockings to look like the flesh colour was coming through.  On the areas that the stockings were stretched (knee, shin bone) I kept highlighting almost up to white.  Super thin glazes were used and on the extreme highlights almost point painting (i.e. small dots of colours) was used.

Another technique to do stockings is to paint the leg as flesh, then glaze over repeatedly with the stocking colour.  Guess I’ll try that next time :)

The shoes were based with VMC Leather Brown and highlighted up with VGC Khaki.  I made the mistake of trying brown as the first highlight colour but that failed and then I remembered the VMC Leather Brown (note, not the VGC Leather Brown) works better with the much lighter Khaki/Bonewhite colours.

So next is the blue for the cloak.  I’ll start with the area on the front of the figure so I can figure out quickly if the blue is going to work or not before I get to the large back area.