50050 Lobo Sanchez, bandito: sculpt J. Wiebe, paint D. Schubert

[dks]

I spent some time painting over the past holiday weekend.

 

Here is my take on the Chronoscope bandito, Lobo Sanchez (plus unnamed iguana hanger-on), sculpted by Jason Wiebe.

I used a monochrome scheme meant to replicate a sepia-toned photograph, as I did for Buffalo Bill Cody and Doc Holliday. You may also have seen figures that I painted in black-and-white or dark-green-to-yellow-ocher "monochrome" schemes.

I did most of the painting on this figure in two sessions of about 2-3 hours each, plus a few shorter sessions for adjusting the values and smoothing the gradations.

 

I have taught classes on monochrome painting at ReaperCon and other conventions. As I explain in the class, painting in a monochrome scheme forces you to focus on value and contrast, because [edit: "...you can't choose different colors to distinguish one area from another"]. How do you make something look like cloth, metal, skin, hair, scales, leather, or stone?; smooth or rough?; shiny or dull? Where do you want to draw the viewer's eye? These are issues that you have to consider in full-color painting, too, but the colors are an extra level of complexity.

 

 

Enjoy,

Derek

Edited July 10, 2013 by dks

[buglips*the*goblin]

Nicely done, Derek! You knocked it out of the park again!

[fanguad]

This is a really neat effect - it definitely makes me think of an old portrait, much more so than the two others you linked (they make me think "there's an awful lot of brown on those miniatures").

 

I thought about this for a minute or two and came up with two hypotheses:

1) Buffalo Bill and Doc Holliday have two different tones on them. Bill's boots and bear stand out as a different colors. The differences on Doc Holliday are a lot more subtle, but the hat/hat band is the most noticeable example of two side-by-side colors. Lobo appears to have a single tone - there might be some differences between the dark shadows and the light shadows, but it doesn't immediately stand out.

2) Flesh tone. Bill and Doc have natural looking skin, which calibrates my brain that the rest of the miniature is "normal." Lobo has green skin, so my brain instantly knows there's something "wrong."

 

Can I ask what blending technique you used, and if it differs at all from what you would use on non-monochrome paint jobs?

Edited July 8, 2013 by fanguad

[youwashock]

Yup. That's awesome. Stepped straight out of an old movie.

[Corporea]

beautiful! It does look just like an old photo! I especially like the blanket pattern. The iguana tail almost seems to blend into it like a chameleon!

[Doug Sundseth]

I love the painting. The details are very well chosen, the tones work well, and the brushwork is to your usual brilliant standard.

 

I would like to see a natural parchment background (or similarly colored other material), because right now I'm getting a bit of cognitive dissonance from the monochrome figure on a monochrome background with a different color temperature.

[CashWiley]

Great work. After doing the first round of tartan on the pooch I'm painting, I want to go break my brushes looking at your cloth freehand :) But beyond the great freehand, the texture you achieved on the blanket is outstanding. Nice and worn looking.

 

I still like Doc more, but he's one of my all-time favorite paint jobs.

[Grimreaper71]

Very nicely done

[Metalchaos]

His poncho is outstanding!

[Tom T]

Wow! Very serious Respect.

[dks]

Thanks, all!

 

@fanguad: Interesting points.

As you may remember seeing in my classes, I do a lot of brush-by-brush mixing (for wet-blending, layering, and glazing), sometimes between two colors that are quite far apart in value or hue -- so my full-color miniatures have a lot of little variations in the colors. But when I paint sepia monochrome (or any monochrome with a midtone that isn't just gray), I have to do things slightly differently. I premix 10 wells of color on my palette, and then I have to limit myself to doing my usual blending and layering techniques using 2 colors from adjacent wells. I have to avoid blending directly from light brown to dark brown, because the color between them will be "wrong" (the white in the light brown interacting with the black in the dark brown to make a gray-brown, not the properly saturated medium brown). Only if the monochrome were a strict gradation between two colors (a "black" and a "white") could I blend a high value and a low value and still get the right middle value. What looks like different colors on Buffalo Bill or Doc Holliday are probably places where I skipped steps in painting the value progression (e.g. blended from well #5 to well #7, instead of #5 to #6 to #7), and a new/inconsistent color was the result.

Or it might be a matter of the color progression itself. On Buffalo Bill, I had more yellow in the high values, going to more orange-browns in the middles and darks. On Lobo, I used duller colors overall.

Or it might be a function of contrast and the complexity of the sculpt. On Lobo, I used deeper shadows and higher contrast. Buffalo Bill's boots seem to be so different from his trousers because the values of the boots (e.g. call them 50% to 80% brightness) don't overlap much with the values of the trousers (e.g. 20% to 60%), and there isn't another object nearby that spans the gap (e.g. 35% to 70%).

Enough analysis for now....

 

@Corporea: Part iguana, part chameleon!

 

@Doug Sundseth: I thought about using a background whose color was consistent with the colors of the figure, but then I decided that the cognitive dissonance of the gray background would show that this is a figure painted in sepia tones, not just an image electronically converted to sepia tones.

 

@CashWiley: Thanks. I added the textures and mottling on the blanket after my initial freehand, because it looked too smooth and pristine. So give your tartan another round. I'm glad you like Doc so much.

 

Derek

[Warlady]

Awesome, as always. And I always learn so much from your pictures and descriptions of the paint jobs. Thanks!

[TheBucklandBrewer]

I have so much respect for those who master this technique!

Loving this, black and white is awesome, sepia rocks even more.

 

Some day I hope to have the courage to try something like this aswell and then I will absolutely use your work as a source of inspiration.

 

I'm at the brink of finishing my Chronoscope Sheila-mini and now I've got a reason to buy her a second time to try out this techinique, would love to see you doing a similar job on her!

 

Top-work as usual Derek!