Painting for Dummies -- More Highlighting

Posted by Ranillon on 8. April 2009 12:19

I love capes – or, at least, painting them.  They are made for a painter like me.  Whereas the scariest thing I can face on the hobby table is a flat surface that needs to be filled, capes are ruffled surfaces perfect for highlighting.  So, here is an example, one I want to use to demonstrate how quick and easy something like this can be to paint.

In this case I started off with Mechrite Red (a GW foundation paint that is one of the few good reds out there – usually reds are weak and require many coats to get right), went to Blood Red, and finally Blazing Orange.  Note that I didn’t use any blended colors.  I wanted to illustrate the results you can get using off-the-rack pigments.

Just like before I worked my way up, putting on the colors in the order of darkest to lightest, lowest to highest.  As I went the colors were spread out less and less to mimic the effect of the light reflecting off the material of the cape.  Every frame at left is one color being added at a time.  In this case I didn’t even drybrush, but merely painted out the reds carefully.

For those that don’t know drybrushing is when you take a brush, put on a small bit of paint, wipe off almost all of that paint, and then carefully dust what remains on to the model.  You do so briskly back and forth.  The aim is to let the brush automatically leave the pigment on the highest parts of the figure.  Done right it makes for a more gradual transition between colors.  The difficulty with dryburshing is control – it’s easy to spread the paint in places you don’t want it to be.  Also, it can produce a fuzzy result if the paint is too dry and a gloppy one if it is too wet.  It really is an art and properly so – a big difference between a good and great painter is how well they drybrush.

However, this is a post on how to be a pretty good painter, not a great one.  It’s also, in this case, about getting the best results with the least effort (and skill).  So, for this cape I have refrained from drybrushing just to show what you can achieve with straight painting (which is easier to do).  Later on I will use some drybrushing to improve the effect.

One other trick I’ve used in the last frame is a wash made of watered down Mechrite Red.  I then applied it liberally across the cape to soften the transition between colors.  It’s an imperfect substitute for drybrushing, but – again – it’s also quick and easy to do.

More to come...