Vordakai Cyclops Lich 60082

[Gargs 5898]

My next project, also for my current Pathfinder game. This one looks like a real fun model and am looking to improve my layering technique as there are some nice areas on him to practice that.

 

As always, any suggestions along the way are most welcome.  Here is in his primed glory. Hoping to get a decent amount of work on the skin done today, looking forward to doing some fun stuff with the eye as well, but waiting on some supplies (read paint) to come in first.

 

Oh and I totally forgot about doing a WIP of the base, but there ya go. At least there will be some stuff likely added at the end. :)

 

 

Thanks for looking!

[Glitterwolf 205007]

I have one as well.

 

Anxious to see how you paint this guy!

[WhiteWulfe 41214]

Love the base, and those hands just scream "I will siphon your soul!" 

[Gargs 5898]

1 minute ago, Glitterwolf said:

I have one as well.

 

Anxious to see how you paint this guy!

 

Heh, I'm anxious to see how it goes too! Planning on trying a couple new ideas out on him, in particular hoping to get better results on the skin as I'm terrible with skin tones -- mainly because I haven't had many opportunities to try (did a lot of figs where pretty much just the face was visible).

 

1 minute ago, WhiteWulfe said:

Love the base, and those hands just scream "I will siphon your soul!" 

 

Thanks! Now hopefully the rest will live up to the hype of the base lol!

[Glitterwolf 205007]

22 minutes ago, Gargs said:

 

Heh, I'm anxious to see how it goes too! Planning on trying a couple new ideas out on him, in particular hoping to get better results on the skin as I'm terrible with skin tones -- mainly because I haven't had many opportunities to try (did a lot of figs where pretty much just the face was visible).

 

 

Thanks! Now hopefully the rest will live up to the hype of the base lol!

 

There are some good tutorials videos on youtube if you need them.

 

Basically, paint the darkest tone, then highlight on the cheekbones, forehead, nose etc.

 

[Gargs 5898]

Yeah I've checked a lot of them out, I think my biggest problems are a) I'm still learning how to blend well and b) I probably don't go far enough on the contrasts, so it tends to come out flat, but then I'm always afraid of going too far and having it look silly. :p But, that's what thin paints and repaints are for right?

[Gargs 5898]

P3 Thrall Flesh (or I suppose in this case it should be Lord Flesh ;p )

 

 

It has a bit more green to its tone in person than shows up here, but you get the idea. Also got a little messy with the brush here, but wanted to make sure I was getting everything covered that needed it. Still found a couple areas that the brush missed when I went to photograph.

[Gargs 5898]

Washed with a mix of P3 Thrall Flesh and P3 Cryx Bane Base. Then drybrushed Thrall Flesh to cut down the wash some.

 

Looks a little rough, but still looking decent in person. Always hard to tell with a wash and drybrush approach until I'm done with the highlighting, but the next part is where things could go horribly wrong, so, fingers crossed!

 

[Gargs 5898]

Well, I don't think it went horribly wrong, but not sure it went horribly right either.

 

So, here's what I was going for. I glazed in some Imperial Purple in select places in an attempt to give an impression of bruised flesh/skin. Then proceeded to highlight with a mix of Thrall Flesh and P3 Menoth White Highlight, with increasing amounts of Menoth White Highlight. Then tried to bring it all back together by glazing over the entirety of the skin with Thrall Flesh.

 

Not sure yet on how it turned out. lol Looking for honest thoughts on this. Scrap the purple altogether? Leave it in? More highlights? More glazing of the thrall flesh over everything? As I said, this is something new for me, so looking for some honest suggestions and thoughts as I try to expand my toolset. Anyway, on to the photos!

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Glitterwolf 205007]

Leave it in and glaze over it with your midtone.

You might want to do that several times, leave every glaze to dry before repeating.

 

If you take a look at my Countess Karnstein Bust WIP you will see I did something like that as well.

It will take a lot of effort because you need more layers of glazes, but in the end it will look great.

[Gargs 5898]

4 hours ago, Glitterwolf said:

Leave it in and glaze over it with your midtone.

You might want to do that several times, leave every glaze to dry before repeating.

 

If you take a look at my Countess Karnstein Bust WIP you will see I did something like that as well.

It will take a lot of effort because you need more layers of glazes, but in the end it will look great.

 

Thanks! I'm definitely going to give that a try! This, in all likelihood, is another of those learning steps in general and skin tones in particular. Just remembering to be patient and take my time. Not sure I'll get anything done today as its game day, but hopefully tomorrow I can squeeze some time in around cleaning and packing the house.

[Gargs 5898]

Moar Progress!

 

So, I actually like where the bruising is now for the most part (thanks @Glitterwolf, the glazing helped a ton!) Also a big thanks to @Guindyloo for her tutorial on glazing, i.e. how thin it needs to be. Now I'm not sure on the shading of the skin, lol. Will think on it a bit and consider more glazes there, or fixing up some of the shades with just a mid-tone or highlight. Only potential issue with the bruising areas are that it might be too light now, but better that than the way it was before.

 

Also, while letting the assorted glaze layers dry, I also got in the shade coat for the cloak (P3 Thamar Black). Thoughts on the skin? Any added glazes needed, more mid tone/highlight? As always all thoughts, ideas, suggestions, critiques are most welcome!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Gargs 5898]

While I think on the flesh, continued working on the cloak. P3 Thamar Black layered into Nightshade Purple into about a 50/50 mix of Nightshade Purple and Imperial Purple. Now just trying to figure out how high I want to bring the highlights, but right now liking the look of it, wanting the cloak to be pretty dark so might leave it as is, but will see when I work on the rest of the clothing. Looking at the pics, the bottom right of the back of the cloak does seem a little dark, might lighten it up some, thoughts?

 

As always thanks for looking and for any suggestions.

 

 

[Gargs 5898]

So I pushed the highlights on the cloak all the way up to pure Imperial Purple. A bit difficult to see in the photos below but it does really pop a bit more in person. (I swear, I really do intend to set up a better photo table someday and then actually learn how to take decent photographs). As I was doing that I was also thinking about what color to make the rest of his clothes (yeah I know, thinking about this ahead of time is actually smart and all, but I just love this particular purple triad so I knew I had to use at least the two darker parts of it -- perhaps the Lady of the Singular Footwear is rubbing off on me). 

 

Anyway, since this is going to ultimately be used in my Pathfinder game I didn't want to use green if I could help it because of reasons.* The next logical contrast color for purple, at least according to my color wheel, is yellow and, umm, well not a huge fan of yellow, but I also had two distinct sets of cloth still to go (the robe and the assorted ribbons? tassles? I guess?). So then it struck me, "Aha! I can make the robe the same color as the cloak and then maybe just use a little bit of yellow for those other bits, that wouldn't be so bad!" So I started to put in the shade of Thamar Black. As I was doing this though, the problem with that plan presented itself: In the back, the robe peaks out underneath the cloak, and making them the same color would potentially obscure that detail quite a bit. Ultimately though, I decided to make it basically the same but instead of starting at Thamar Black, I started at Nightshade Purple and instead went all the way up to Amethyst Purple.

 

Back:

 

 

Front:

 

 

From a distance, it doesn't look too bad, but up close, particularly in the front: Yikes

 

 

Now, part of it is that I still need to go back and glaze over everything with my midtone and that should hopefully help some. Part of it too though is that I think I was just getting a bit tired while painting and wasn't thinking everything through real well and some of those transitions still look pretty abrupt, even though I was going in really small increments with my paints/layers. I also belatedly found the really good tutorial on layering by @Kuro Cleanbrush that has some nice tips for avoiding some of the abrupt transitions. I think I will start by trying to glaze over the transitions and see if that helps things out, but I may just go back and start fresh, making my paint even thinner (the paint might have been getting a bit thick since it dries up really quick on me).

 

Any tips or suggestions though would be greatly appreciated as would constructive criticism. 

 

* And for those who actually care about the RPG "reasons" for avoiding green:

 

Spoiler

So far in the campaign, I have been associating the main BBEG with the color green, more specifically a brightish glowing green (think P3 Necrotite Green). Her minions have all had this represented in them to one degree or another. Vordakai here is definitely a bad guy, but he is not HER bad guy and is actually someone who has fought against her in the past, so for those reasons I wanted to avoid green on him as much as possible, though a bit of green in his flesh made sense as he is undead.

 

[Guindyloo 47479]

The cloak is so lovely, especially in the shoulder area! I think you've done really well with the principles of painting black, which is not an easy task!

Although it was smart of you to sort of recycle the same colours from the cloak into the robe because it gives a more cohesive look, the robe part is not working for you. There's not enough of a delineation between where the cloak and robe meet so it looks like it's meant to be the same fabric, just over-highlighted on the robe parts. To fix that, you need to fully commit to the purple. Of course this doesn't mean you have to have a lavender robe by any means, you just need to not be quite so aggressive with your shadows. I would paint over all of the Nightmare Purple on the robe entirely with whatever your next lightest (but still dark) purple is. It looks like there's hints of something in here:

Whatever the purple in the circled bits is, I would use that as your darkest shadow and try to ease the transitions a bit more as you work your way up. It's not that you're using too much contrast, it's that you're jumping too quickly from point A to point Z and going in too broadly with both your shadows and your highest highlights.

 

That brings me to the skin. I don't think that the bruise appearance of the shadows is a bad idea, but your midtone skin colour is way too light to work with such dark shadows and because it's such a creamy colour that doesn't mesh at all with those other colours, I don't think that glazing is going to ease the transition enough. To make that creamy yellow colour work as a midtone, your shadow colour would have to only be a couple of steps darker and your highlight would need to go all the way up to a bright white.

 

And this is kind of why I don't love washes for a lot of applications - they deposit colour into recesses even if those recesses are aimed directly at where your light source would be shining right down on, so you end up with an aggressively dark shadow where only a light tint of a shadow would be. There's nothing wrong with using a wash by any means, I use them myself on certain applications (although, admittedly, I tend to use products that are made as washes more as ready-made glazes than for their intended application,) but you really want to think about how the wash is going to lay down that dark colour and try to use them as thoughtfully as you can.

Lighting in general is a tricky thing. We tend to regard our eyeballs as the light source and highlight whatever part is poking out the most. The problem with that, of course, is that our eyes move as the figure does. So you want to pick where the light is coming from and be consistent with it. That's way easier said than done! That's why really strong OSL, when it's executed properly, is so amazing, because it's a complicated understanding of where the light source is and how it's affecting the figure.

The easiest light source is to imagine the sun. The sun is usually going to be off to the side just a little bit, but it's easiest to go with a light source from straight above, then gradually work toward a truer "zenithal" light source that's off to the side just a bit.

One trick for discovering how to highlight a figure with a light source from directly above is to hold it directly under a bright light. You can use your lamp, the light on your phone, a flashlight, etc. Anything that's going to put very harsh light directly on the figure so that you can see the exaggerated contrast that the harsh lighting leaves. You should see really distinct, dark shadows where the light isn't hitting those parts of the figures at all. Those are the only areas where your darkest shadow colour should go.

Another trick that I use constantly is to hold the figure directly in front of my chest so that I'm looking down at the top of the figure's head. The bits that I see poking out beyond the top of their head are the only spots that should get my brightest highlight. 

 

So, all of that said, I don't think you need to start over by any means. I think that the easiest path to go down would be with a glaze, but it needs to be the right colour. I would shoot for a dark mustard-y yellow with a green-ish tint. I would highly recommend that you do some experiments on a figure that you don't care about or can easily dunk into Simple Green when you're done. Bones figures are perfect for such experiments. It doesn't even need to be a similar figure, you just need some kind of somewhat similar texture. (So, you wouldn't want to experiment over a fur texture, you'd want something flatter.) If you don't have a figure that you can experiment on, alternatives would be watercolour paper (or a paper that's thick enough that it won't break down when you glaze over it,) a spare chunk of sprue, the underside of a figure or your hand. Recreate what you have here and then experiment with glazes to see what darkens it up to a tone somewhere between the bruising effect and the creamy yellow.

 

I did a quick and dirty mock-up in Microsoft Paint to try to illustrate what I mean.

For the skin, I left the bruising in tact but went over the creamy yellow with the sort of "dark mustard-y yellow with a green-ish tint" I mean. Then I highlighted up to the creamy yellow that you had on there originally. Then hopefully you can see how much better the purple robe works by going for a more solid midtone purple overall and easing back both the shadows and the highlights. I know it's a crude example, but hopefully that helps in some way!

 

Keep working on it, you've got some nice work going and some really cool ideas!