I had another lovely walk to the studio today, the beautiful fresh air of Augsburg gets the blood pumping and invigorated for a big day of painting. Arriving at the studio this morning I quickly took a few more snaps of the corridor into it. I also brought a few gifts and found a few of them just hanging around...
Today we had a good canvas to work on, having done a lot of the preparatory work yesterday. Today was all about focusing on the little details, the pieces that elevate a model, and again pushing those highlights and contrasts up and up!
Before we started though, Raffa had brought into the studio a few models for me to look at:
I said it on Twitter, and I will say it here again. Next level shit man. Raffa drilled out the eyeballs on the Tiefling bust, painted in the rich colours then used an epoxy resin to create the dome. You can look at them from the side and they just look so real. The Red Lion is incredible in real life, the detail is simply beautiful and he has so much interesting colours in his skin that isn't immediately apparent. And the monkey is great!
Alright, onto painting. The next step was easy. We created some nice smooth shading on the skin yesterday, with some good contrast, but as always more contrast is needed. Here on this guy we focused primarily on the face, and the upper chest, adding in some more intense lights, and one great trick here was mixing in just a little touch of yellow to the white when mixing the highlights. It helped combat the chalkiness and lifeless look that you can get with white. Again, occasionally airbrushing a filter over the top to soften the blends and just keep everything the same tone:
We did a few more touches of highlights, but we began working on some other areas. One thing I wanted to try on this sculpt was some tattoos, and Raffa and I had been discussing other types of contrast over the whole weekend. One interesting one was the contrast between round and hard edged shapes. Contrast is all about creating visual interest. I decided to get a bit fucking loose and go balls deep on some rectangular tattoos, and this was the result:
Raffa enjoyed it... but he wanted MOAR. "Get some on his face mate, we aren't here to fuck spiders!" was his exact wording as he pushed me to go even more elaborate. I got stuck in, and also did some of the hair work. We didn't go too heavily into hair, but discussed more technique on different types of hair like the stippled close shaved head of Tink or the side shavings here on Mannaz.
The next step was the fur. I will admit that this was probably the most challenging part that I did, and I am definitely not happy with the first result. However we really discussed a lot of the minutae and technical aspects of the technique, and on second attempt I got a much better result. Broadly speaking it is using a wet in wet blend to create contrast of the fur volume, and the highlighting the strands further. I am excited to try the technique again and see what I can achieve with more practice.
Another area for me I've struggled with is metallic areas. I think for me this is mostly a technique thing, but also an understanding of how metal works in a lot of ways, and this was a good area for discussion. Raffa did a lot of demonstrating here, and I was also able to see the techniques he used on the gold sections he painted on Tink. Oh yeah, and we did some leather too.
We then began the wind down of the coaching, discussing what sort of things Raffa felt I needed to work on more at home, areas to consider and just general banter. We had a really great time over the two days, lots of joking around, singing terribly (mostly me singing terribly), eating delicious German food and sharing our mutual passion over miniatures and painting. I also got to meet Bene from the MV Studio, or as we like to call him, Sir Castsalot.
I was a little nervous about taking this sort of class on, I feel like my own painting journey is very much at its beginning and when you see some of the incredible pieces that Raffa is not just painting but also sculpting, I was concerned that I would not really be able to get full value out of the teaching. But as is often the case, his teaching was tailored to my own level of expertise, and was able to help me reach the next step as opposed to really advanced techniques that I wasn't able to grasp. I cannot recommend enough taking a class with these guys, the studio itself is so inspiring, the dynamic of the space and the projects and even just the city itself, it really is a wonderful place to paint. I said to Raffa I wished I could just come and hang out and paint sometime, purely for inspiration!! Details of their classes can be found here: Private Coaching.
I'll leave this blog post with a picture of the two models we painted side by side... Big Deno, OUT!
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