Let's take a break from the Dragon (this doesn't mean I'm going to put it aside, just take some time to paint other easier and less mind consuming stuff while I get the painting muse back). I'm staying with High Elves for the moment, back to the Swordmasters of Hoeth! It's been some time since the last update so you might want to check the previous chapter of the process to see where we left off.
The painting process of the whole unit should start by completely painting one of the Elves. This is to get the general idea of how the colour scheme works before putting effort on painting 10 guys, in case there's changes that need to be made. This will certainly save us a lot of time! Even so, there's a lot of work already done in the High Elves Sea Guard unit because the colour scheme will be very similar (they will be in the same army) and there's processes that I will reuse. Therefore, I have planned the painting process beforehand. Let's break down the steps:
- Gems (airbrush)
- Metals (airbrush)
- Hair (airbrush)
- Brushwork
- Outlining
- Banner
- Bases
Looks good and straightforward! :)
So first of all, airbrushing gems. I did this before, exactly the same way, in the High Elves Sea Guard unit, but I will explain it once again for those who didn't follow the other process. Bear in mind that every step I mention will be done on every gem, on every elf.
Airbush of a very light yellow over the whole gem.
Airbush of fiery orange over the gem, trying to leave a bit of light yellow on the edge.
Airbush of blood red yellow over the gem, again leaving a bit of the previous steps to be seen.
Final airbush of chaos black over the upper edge of the gem.
As you can see the result isn't perfect, but it's more than ok for a first approximation. You have to consider that we will use airbrush later, and the appearance of the gem will change with the rest of the elements in place. But with this serial work we will accelerate a lot the painting of gems. So let's cover the gems with liquid mask.
Now let's get back the priming base colour on those areas that were airbrushed with other colours, and then I will airbrush a base metal (Mithril Silver in this case, as the metals in the elves are very bright).
As I said, all this work has been done on all the elves, following a serial process. I'm going to switch back to painting just one elf, to test colour scheme, as I said. Let's work on the armour scales, washing them with some blue and green inks, very dilluted.
This process has to be done carefully, inks are very strong so they paint a lot. When painting it's usually better (in terms of time) to be left short than to have to go back!
The scales are now very dark, let's get back the metal by carefully painting the scales with Mithril Silver, now respecting the general light and shadow scheme on the tunic.
Let's leave the scales there and give some colour to the rest to get a the general idea. Here's some basing of gold metallics (matt brown before introducing metallic pigments), turquoises for hair and inner tunics, and red for the elf's hair.
Continuing on some detail painting, see how the white and blue squares make a big difference.
And now introducing the metallic gold. The scheme looks good so far. The only thing that is not well tuned is the red of the hair. It has to be much darker and colder. Living proof that I did very well experimenting with a single elf before painting all serially!
Even so, I see that to make progress on the elf I need to start shading metals of armour and swords, and that is really much better done serially. As it won't affect my choice of scheme because I already know it works, I will switch back to serial painting from now on.
Continue to WIP: Swordmasters of Hoeth Part 4
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