Viking Bust finished

Over the last two weeks I’ve been playing around with the Viking bust I have.  Along the way I purchased the book "Making Colour Sing" by Jeanne Dobie.  I’ve read a number of how-to painting books across oil/acrylic and watercolour techniques.  Mostly I’m trying to get a deeper understanding of painting composition and colour techniques.  Like all instructional books most say the same thing, just in different ways and with a different emphasis.

Viking Bust

Although this is a water colour specific book it had a very good section on complementary colour theory and neutral greys.  I’ve read this a number of times before but for some reason this one really clicked with me.  I finally (slow learner) realized that to get the colour pop that I’ve been looking for one of the secrets was to shade in the complementary grey of the colour you are painting.  When mixing complementary colours you end up with a ugly grey.  However by altering the ratio of the complementary colours that can be a green grey, a red grey, etc.  So for the red cloak I shaded down with a dark green.  The darker shades had some black mixed in too.  This meant that the red next to the green/grey would stand out more.

Highlighted side of face

I tried this on the face as well and finally started to get some real highlights.  Before I was adding in more white for highlights and getting a bleached out look, or shading with dark colours (to increase the contrast) and just making the flesh look muddy.  Now I got that the opposite of yellow is purple, hence why shading flesh with purple kind of worked in previous attempts.  Also this explained why VMA Armour brown was working (it has some purple in it) with my flesh mixes.

Again, all of this I had ready a number of times before but when I tried to apply that knowledge it didn’t work/click.  Finally it did.

Pre-shading on chain

For the gold chain I decided to do some pre-shading rather than do a heavy gold coat and then try and shade it.  So I used VMC Golden brown as the main pre-shade colour and used VMC Dark sea blue and VMC Flat yellow for the shades/highlights.  I’m still going with the directional light source so the chain closer to the light source was much lighter.  With just one coat of the gold I really got the effect I was after.  I did some extra highlights with VMA Aluminium and metal medium (aka sparkly paint).

I’m not 100% on the hair, but I’m finding the bulk of it slightly excessive and overflowing.  The figure must be using some serious hair gel to get those size ridges.

For the shirt my base as VMC Turquoise and VMC Prussian Blue.  I think this is where my new knowledge paid off the best.  Normally I just darken blue with dark blue/black.  Instead I used dark orange for the shadows under the face.  That really flattened out the blue.  I used light blue/white on the highlights and stayed away from any yellow (to avoid things going green).  Very happy with that shirt.

On the cloak I went too hard on the highlights on the shoulder and ended up with orange stripes.  So I went back and raised the colour of the shoulder in general and then redid the highlights.  I also cross hatched the highlight areas in an effort to show a bit of the cloth texture.  That worked a bit, but really I need to do the whole cloak with the cross hatching for that to work properly.

The base is a piece of pine chopped at an angle and painted satin black.  The figure is attached by a piece of brass tubing (1/8 inch).

So my first try in directional light is over.  It worked ok.  It looks like there is a brighter light from the side of the figure.  It isn’t extreme which would probably look better, but I think it is enough.  The figure is a bit odd in that logical highlight area is not on the front of the figure but I enjoyed the size of it.