Hello guys, welcome back to Not Just Mecha, it’s Marco here and today we’ll touch
a ton of different advanced topics painting a bust!
Last week I used this lovely little bust to explain my workflow in rendering realistic
eyes but you asked for more and since I left the camera on during the whole process here’s
a little masterclass with a lot of juicy stuff and ideas that we can also expand in future
videos.
Display models take time and they don’t fit well in the YouTube format so I had to
focus the screen time on the parts I think are more important but I believe this a good
way to start introducing more advanced topics following the increasing skills of our community.
As always, feel free to tell me in the comments what’s interesting and useful for you so
I can use the feedback and your ideas for future, more specific videos.
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channel and if you want to support my work check my Patreon page!
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single week, so if you like my content consider to join the Community!
The first step is to choose the main angle in which the bust will be presented on the
plinth.
Display models don’t move around like gaming figures and they are meant to sit on a shelf
delivering their story in a static way, similar to an artwork framed on the wall.
This apparently trivial choice is the foundation of the whole storytelling and working on a
bust this becomes even more important because the relation between the viewer and the model
all happens with and around the face.
I can keep the body in the middle with the head turned on this side, making him look
to something in the distance but I think I can create a more powerful and engaging scene
pointing the face in our direction.
The general idea is about one of the poor souls of Mordheim finding a warpstone nugget
on the floor and looking down in a mix of surprise and greed.
Setting the MacGuffin of the story between us and the figure will make us part of the
scene and of an imaginary standoff to whoever takes the magic stone first.
I left the model primed in black inside a box for a while and I really need to see better
all the details before committing to a strong, definitive light so I play safe spraying a
light coat of neutral grey.
I focus the light on the face for obvious reasons but as you can see this layer is very
general and diffused to let me catch and read all the various elements and textures.
Now that I can see what I’m going to paint I can switch to pure titanium white and perfect
shape, position and intensity of my lights.
I usually create the entire grey modulation using only transparent layers of white over
the black primer, but here the grey intermediate step gave me the opportunity to understand
better what I need to highlight.
I also set few interesting silhouettes to separate better the different planes of the
model introducing an illustrational sense of the volumes and exaggerating their three-dimensional
presence.
We cannot rely on natural light to create the sense of volume and scale, even working
on large figures.
Not to mention pathos and theatrical drama!
I move immediately to the wet palette because I want to complete the boring stage of the
basic mid tones as quickly as possible and move to the fun part as soon as I can.
I think an approach based on sketching, roughness and textures suits well the subject and the
story I want to tell, and I can’t create those sensations with the airbrush!
Plus, I just want to use the brush and following the impulse is always part of an effective
session of happy painting!
I often see intermediate painters losing a lot of time trying to make this first layer
super opaque, uniform and smooth.
Strangely beginners are much more relaxed about this and they are on the right track!
The mid tones are not so important, and you should consider them more as a base to build
the flowing modulation of lights and shadows than a real entity.
At the end, these pure basic tones will be represented only by a fraction of a millimetre
naturally turning into lights and shadows and their tones.
For these reason in this stage I tend to use paints able to tint the surface with a single
pass, relatively transparent to keep the information of the value sketch but with a good saturation
to fight the power of the white underneath and deliver the hues I have in mind.
Inks, high flow paints and contrast paints all have these properties and make a great
job in setting the basic tones.
Yeah, you can use contrast paints even on display models, they are just paint.
I want something deeper for the black parts, so I mix a chromatic black using green and
violet.
The mix of the two complementary tones has a bluish note that becomes more subtle increasing
the opacity and losing the luminosity of white from below.
You can easily modulate these parameters to obtain a variety of interesting blacks.
Ok, now you are entering in the blender of information and techniques that is my brain.
Try to keep up and let me know if this makes sense.
I base the skin with a quick, cheater version of a classic Verdaccio.
Verdaccio is an underpainting technique, and specific paint colour, first used by the Italian
fresco painters of the early Renaissance.
Verdaccio is used like grisaille to quickly establish tonal values but using a soft greenish
grey for the shadows of flesh tones that makes them crazily realistic and full of depth.
Traditionally the colour is a mixture of Mars Black and Yellow Ochre plus white for the
lights and this mix looks suspiciously like plague bearer flesh, check my video about
the Zorn palette because these are also basic tones in that limited palette system.
Everything is connected!
Frazetta also used these tones as lot in his work!
I apply the “Verdaccio” tone over a simple grisaille and I obtain a full verdaccio base
for my skin in two simple steps.
The simplified version, without following me in the rabbit hole, is that plague bearer
flesh is a good, interesting base for any kind of realistic flesh.
Ok, in this stage it looks like a zombie skin, but trust me, it will provide a great natural
foundation for the proper skin tones!
The last step of the base work is the check pattern of the jacket.
We are used to paint freehands in the last stages of the paint job but, like in this
case they are integral part of the material they are weaved into, so they catch light
in the same way and generate similar lights and shadows.
It’s better to set these elements in place from the very beginning and work the whole
area in a coherent way.
Here I sketch lights and shadows on the red leather of the cowl.
I follow the general pattern set by my value sketch, but I quickly introduce colours and
stronger value jumps modelling the three-dimensional shapes like a two-dimensional artwork.
All I need to know about position and intensity is already on the model so I just have to
fill the spaces and have fun.
Thanks to the Verdaccio base and how it will interact with the skin tones I can keep my
palette super simple, using just few premade colours, still delivering a crazy amount of
visual depth and information.
Pure red is an essential part of bringing the skin to the side of the living adding
the sensation of the blood running under the skin with simple filters and glazes.
I’ll publish part of the real time footage on my Patreon, but I really believe that at
this speed you can better appreciate how the skin changes in few steps.
Here, understanding the general flow is much more useful than the single brushstrokes.
This is also part of the beauty of the sketching workflow.
Every single step is extremely simple and straightforward when analysed by itself; you
can see that even the few tones on the palette are quite basic and mostly used straight from
the bottle but the final complexity you get is far superior to the sum of the parts!
The work on the yellow fabric is based on stippling to obtain a fine texture of old
rough wool.
What’s interesting here is the presence of those two green tones on the palette.
The left side will be into the cold tones of night and the bluish light of a fantasy
full moon so I start from now pushing the yellow into colder tones that will easily
support and connect with the bluish tones I’ll glaze later on top of this side.
Again, if you want to paint believable realistic textures, they have to be part of the shading/highlighting
process and not simply put on top of the modulation.
Overlapping the colour and the physical volume of fine lines of paint you can create the
illusion of depth of hundreds of real interwoven fibres.
I alternate vertical and horizontal lines every time pushing the light a bit more towards
the vector and intensity of the main light I set at the beginning with the airbrush.
Every fiber is a sigle little entity but all together they make the general surface and
I have to render these two behaviours.
Luckily we have plenty of references in the real world!
I took this shot before starting the work on the eyes.
I worked in the corners for the needs of recording, that’s not important, the interesting part
is to see how simple the palette is compared to what I have on the model at this stage.
Basic pools of tones used mostly pure and undiluted and few simple mixes and pools for
quick glaze and filters.
Time to smooth out the sketch.
The idea is the same of smoothing with glazes and what I’m applying here is precisely
a glaze but quickly applied with the airbrush.
I use a tone close to my initial base to unify the modulation under the general hue of that
area.
Since I’m using this glazing only to soften the brushstrokes in a general way and not
for shading for example, I don’t need the precise control and directional flow of the
brush.
For that kind of application the brush is much more effective and easy to control, but
here I can cut a lot of time of let’s be honest, boring work.
I lose a bit of contrast but I’m in a stage where I can easily and quickly intervene on
this aspect and it’s something I had to do anyway working on details and definition
but I cut a ton of glazing time so at the end the balance is super positive.
You can see how much difference this step makes on the work on the hood.
And this is the last time I use the airbrush on this model!
Back to the wet palette!
Before working on the lights I want to reintroduce a bit more textures on the leather of the
cowl.
The sketch was rougher here and I needed a couple extra layers to smooth it out so I
want to bring back a bit of movement before fusing everything into the strong environmental
lights.
I like to work these environmental light conditions on top of an advanced general painting of
the various elements, materials and their volumes so I can render in a more realistic
way how every bit interacts in its own way with the external light.
I prepare a yellow filter adding water and glaze medium and I apply it to the whole right
side to start building the idea of the fire of a torch held on that side.
And I do the same with a light blue on the right side.
These are filters and quite heavy in their content of paint so much faster than a glaze
and I don’t bother to use the airbrush for this.
Four or five of these layers and you get something like this.
I had to add a drop of mat varnish in every pool because I used too much glaze medium,
and everything started becoming super glossy.
At this point it’s just a matter of adding the high and highest lights.
Again if something catches light it means it has a volume therefore it’s a texture
and since this guy is covered in rough fabric, thick wool and old leather I can build this
whole layer using interesting textures enhanced by the new powerful lights.
The colours at this stage are very simple because I'm rendering the extreme consequence
of the environemtnal lights and I have to handle only a short orange-yellow range and
a light blue modulation.
Before going too far with the two side lights risking to lose the space for the warpstone
glow I start introducing the green from below.
I want something like a triangle of light coming from below and converging on his eye
and I feel that if I start with a filter I can’t make it as sharp and directional as
I want so I reverse the process starting mapping the vector of the green light with a medium
high value of green starting from the edges.
This will give me a better sense of the space I need to fill with the filter.
Again few layers of diluted paint stabilised with a bit of glaze medium are used to do
the trick!
In the last steps I turn the filter into a glaze for more control and to decrease it’s
opacity that is starting to be quite solid in the central part.
I use Golden high flow florescent green for a final kick in the green highlights.
The last steps are all about creating the final definition making the details I already
have sharper and sharper.
My palette at this point is just a consequence of all the work done before and since everything
was built with simple tones it shows the same direct simplicity until the end.
Deciding when a model is finished is always difficult especially if you are having fun
with it.
Luckily working on a bust iss almost impossible to paint too many details or too much definition!
And here’s the final result!
I didn’t paint a bust for a while and I almost forgot how much I love this format.
About 13 hours of happy happy happy painting in a moment when I really needed a pause from
gaming models and their load of expectations and pre-existing backgrounds.
It's like painting a distilled version of a model where only the funniest elements remain,
and the best part is that despite the dimension you can easily transfer what you learn in
any other scale.
Again check my Patreon page for more, real time footage especially if you need a focus
on a specific step and tell me in the comments what topic would you like to see in its own
dedicated video!