Excelsy Step by Step

I have noticed a trend with a lot of the models I have painted recently, although its been unconscious. I have tended to stick heavily to blue and red as my core colours.  Whether it be confidence in painting them, or just the power of the colours, I seem to stick very closely to them.

When I picked up this bust, I had no real vision for it outside of wanting her to feel like she was in an outside glade, with a greenish tint to her armour and hair.  As I progressed this idea faded away, as I chose a purple colour for the armour.  It certainly has been a challenging paint job and I think the end result is probably one of my best pieces so far.

Here is the step by step process I followed.

Firstly I airbrushed the base coat skin colour, then added some very simple shading.  I used green and a warm yellow for the basic highlighting.  

It can often be tricky to see exactly how well the contrast is going when the rest of the model is still a quite bright value.  I painted the hair to get a better idea of the face.  I added more contrast, painted in the eyes, and lips started.  I was pretty happy at this stage with the face, so I began working on the hair.

After bringing the hair up a few stages, I put a few touches more into the face, and then decided to go balls deep on some freckles, and a bit of eyeshadow.  I then airbrushed the armour purple.  I put a little bit of shading into the airbrushing but not a lot.  I wanted to use the brush for most of the contrast and highlighting work.

After I finished up with the airbrush, I filled in the other colours. I used white mixed in with purple to figure out were I wanted the high points of light.  I then painted in the yellow areas, which I never intended to be NMM.  I've never painted it before and I am not really sure of how to do it.

I smoothed out some of the purple,and began adding the highlights to the yellow areas, and painted in the black.  Now that the whole figure was painted, I could see that there was some issues with the purple being too powerful and distracting from the focal point of the face.

I tried to darken the purple with a little bit of dark blue.  I decided to attach the other arm and paint it alongside the rest of it. You can see the purple how it starts vs the shaded and highlighted areas.

I put more work into the yellow gold areas, and fixed up the helmet, painted the cloak.  I did the metallic areas and her hand.  She is starting to look pretty good!

Painted the gemstone, the rest of the metallics, and added some more highlighting to the yellow.

I deepened the shadows on the purples, put some more white highlights in the yellow areas.  The final few touches were adding some scratches to the armour, as it was looking a little too clean.  I darkened the metallics.

I painted the grip of the sword, a few little touchups here and there, and then I called her done!

I have to say that I think this is my best model to date.  I unfortunately realised about halfway through that I painted her to look identical to the 3rd version that Marc Masclans painted, and his shits all over mine.  But I do not feel embarrassed putting mine up beside it, which I think is an achievement!

Next model I will paint will be a full figure, as I've done quite a few busts recently.