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.
