3 - Shading the Senators

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Ramiro Peira of PaintingPRO writes:

Shading and highlighting the robes (blending)

After the first step, I painted the the deepest shadows of the robe with a darker colour. I've given one Senator a grey robe, and the other figure a brown robe. For the grey robe, I used a mixture of blue, white and black paint. Why blue? Just to give a deeper finish.

Perhaps I should have applied a lighter shadow, because blending was very hard from dark grey to black, and it developed some texture because of the successive coats of paint.

Exaggerated Shading has now been applied to the robe to bring out the deepest areas. Elapsed Time So Far: Two hours, 20 minutes (for each figure).

In this next step, the orange adornments and ropes were painted Burnished Gold. The black face was highlighted with a grey and blue mix, and then washed with Black Ink. The scrolls were originally painted with Bronzed Flesh, then highlighted with Bleached Bone, then then glazed with a Brown Glaze. The gold parts were washed with a mix of Brown and Red Ink.

For the robes, I started blending from white to grey, which has a 25% mix of Ultramarines Blue. I do the mix on a palette, applying some white, black and blue paint. I paint tone by tone from the outer areas to the deepest ones. Each time I go down a "level" or down some "height" on the robe, I add to the white paint a bit of black and blue.

This palette shows how to mix three colours. I had to blend from light-grey to dark-grey. I used a bit of blue too.

The brown robe was easier than the grey one (which took an hour and 20 minutes!), because the shadows and highlighting process took me just 40 minutes.

The robes are now finished. Elapsed Time So Far: 4 hours each (average).

Next Time: Finishing the Details!