Road To Golden Demon - Episode 2
“Practice, practice, practice”
- Inspirational Quote Generator
Let’s talk about skin, textures and NMM but mostly skin.
I needed to up my layering and blending game. Having picked up the trick of using purples for low lighting I wanted to try some better layering for skin tones. I thought some of the best stuff I had done to date was the Darkoath Chieftan I painted for a marshall’s mini monthly comp:
Darkoath Chieftan: oh, hey guy…do you work out?
When painting this fella, in a moment of artistic madness, I had actually bothered to select 3 distinct colours to layer from base coat to highlights. I think we can all agree is some pro-fessional behaviour.
Looking back at it now I can immediately see that a bit of blending/glazing would really make this lad top notch but overall this was a big step forward for me at the time.
We Have The Technology
On a recent trip to Element in Stockport I had finally picked up some Scale 75 colour sets for flesh and NMM.
Warning – if you do visit a paint shop with a mate that was a studio/commission painter – expect to buy more paint (thanks, Darren!).
Honestly, I hadn’t really seen the point in buying such a narrow range of colours until now. But once I had finally started to get the hang of the wet palette – I began to see how using 4 shades already picked out from which to blend would be a massive time saver and improve consistency.
A good workman blames his fancy paint set.
Ok – not going to lie. These sets are/were/continue to be awesome.
Great shades, consistency and super easy to start working with. It even has a guide on how to paint good with it. I feel like I have been living under a rock.
I picked up Garrek’s Reavers and got to work on some skin, textures on the trousers and a somewhat half-assed go at NMM.
So the first step was to practice putting down 3 to 4 layers, experimenting with dark to light transitions. Given that my preferred medium for years was pen/ink sketching the urge to make everything look like a graphic novel is always high. Having laid down a dark purple, and a second layer of dark flesh tone – I then started to experiment with fine banding with the lightest shade. I toned this down a bit with Reikland flesh wash diluted into Lahmian medium to make it less sketchy.
Disclaimer! Please ignore the horrendous gaps.
His enemies called Blooded Saek…but his friends called him the Saeksy sax man.
Not going to lie – if I had my way I would just stop here and call it done. I feels like a mash up of a Frank Frazetta Conan/Anatomical sketch/Frank Miller/John Blanche – which is normally what I would consider the holy amalgam. However, the aim was to grow/improve – see what was possible so…
Next, I took a run at Garrek hisself. This time the aim was to smooth out the transition and also spend a bit more time working on the non-metallic metal elements of his axe and accoutrements.
The fantastically named Garrek Gorebeard. I however prefer Gary Gorebear, for all the Warhammer studio team members reading this.
Honestly, I prefer the first, but I can admit that this looks a bit smoother and natural. All I did differently was create washes using the layer colours + Lahmian medium to glaze this puppy. So I had a punt on the rest of the gang, dialling the effect up and down and generally got the hang of this colour palette.
Family shot: The whole muthaflippin’ scooby gang. Magic Mike rip your eyes out!
On the subject of NMM – in painting up these lads I definitely realised that I kind of get it but also still suck at it. So will take a bit more time to cover this in a future post!
Conclusion
On the whole I think these lads look pretty striking.
The practice was definitely worth it and it was fun to experiment. If you are looking to improve your “skin game”TM - I recommend spending time experimenting with layering on skin. Purples, deep reds, even greens and blues can create wonderful texture and depth.
Given just how much we look at other people all day every day – I think humans have a pretty innate sense of what look natural to us so definitely can just follow your nose on this.
