Figure Painting Tutorial

[mozart]

Good, another two to follow! Well done Ernest. 

[Greif8]

Below is the start of 1/32 Richthofen figure.  As I noted in the above post I will be using oils paints to overpaint the acrylic base colors and add highlights and shadows.

 

The paints and brushes I will be using.  The brushes are all natural hair, 3 different widths of flats and a round.  The flats will be used to apply the oil base coat and the round will be used both to apply the shadows and highlights and to blend them.  Painting uniforms this way is good practice for painting faces with oils.  You generally have a much larger area to work with making applying and blending the oil paints easier.

 

 

 

Closer view of the brushes.  They don't need to be as precise as the ones for painting faces.

 

I always let the oils sit for 10 minutes to leech the extra linseed oil out of them.  This speeds drying time considerably while retaining the long working time of the oil paints. 

 

Paints transferred to the pallet ready to be mixed as required.

 

I'll be painting the sweater first and have mixed some Golden Ochre (top leftmost color) with Burnt Sienna (Next color right) to get the color I want for the sweater.   I have also mixed the shadow colors.  The process here is exactly the same used for painting flesh tones.

 

Base color laid in on the figure's sweater.  I have kept the layer light and translucent to take advantage of the highlights and shadows that remained after airbrushing the acrylic color; a form of pre-shading if you will.  

 

Deep and intermediate shadows have been laid in and blended.  Again, the techniques is exactly the same as for faces or hands, just a bit easier to do as you have more area to work with.

 

Highlights mixed and ready to apply.

 

Step one is to paint a thin line or small area with the color.  You can also make a line of dots or dot and area if brush control is a challenge.

 

The paint is now spread to cover the area I want to highlight.  The same technique is used to apply any shadows or highlights with oils.

 

And the paint is now blended by lightly brushing or strippling the edges where it meets the other color(s).

 

All colors have been applied and blended.  The figure will be set aside to dry in the drying box.  Normally I would have moved right to the turtle neck sweater and trousers but the "Honey Do" list is calling and I have to pause.  More to follow though.

 

 

 

[Greif8]

Chores complete back to painting!  I used a slightly different technique to paint the trousers.  I mixed a green/grey base color that is fairly close to the acrylic base.  I then applied a very thin nearly transparent coat of that color leaving the somewhat darker acrylic color showing through in the shadow areas.  The result is below.  You can see that there is a nice overall contrast that can be fine tuned with some further shadows and highlights.  The trick to this technique is to apply a very thin coat of paint that is a somewhat lighter shade.

 

 

I mixed an even lighter tone and applied that to the high areas of the trousers.

 

I than mixed a dark tone to touch up the shadow areas that I thought needed it.

 

Finally I mixed a very light cold highlight and painted the highest points on the trousers, blending them afterwards.  As always with oil paints less is more.  

 

I'll let the figure dry overnight and we'll take a look at it tomorrow.  The paint will look a bit lighter and should appear to be more blended once dry or nearly so.  Contrast how the trousers look vs the sweater I painted earlier.  The sweater is not fully dry, but did spend 4-5 hours in the drying box and already appears less garish than the trousers.  

 

Ernest

Edited March 1, 2023 by Greif8

[Greif8]

The 1/32 scale figure of the baron is nearly finished, I just have to do the detail painting on the Geschwaderstock and it will be ready to place in the vignette when the time comes.

 

The following three photos show the figure after the oil paint has dried, as well as the start of detail painting of the officer's cap.  I did not do an SBS of the face as I have already done some pretty detailed ones earlier in this thread and I did not use any variations to my normal routine for painting faces.  The oils leveled out nicely as they dried giving a nice subtle blended look to the highlights and shadows.  Again, it is important not to get overly concerned if the freshly painted oils look garish and stark and try to blend them further to tone down the look.  You will end up over blending the paint and kill any transitions between the highlights, base color and shadow areas. 

 

One area that did not turn out like I thought it would is the grey neck area.  I thought I could pull off contrasting colors and missed the target!  I will repaint the neck area after mixing a shade to get a close match for the rest of the sweater.  

 

The figure has had a matt coat sprayed on it with the exception of the flesh areas and cap brim.  The matt coat has deadened the unwanted sheen on the clothing and had further blending effect.  I have repainted the neck area and finished the detail painting, attached the head to the body and I have also painted the boots to look like briwn leather.  I used the exact same technique for the boots that I used on the two figure's leather coats shown earlier in this thread.  The figure will be put in the drying box overnight and will then be complete, with the exception of attaching the Geschwaderstock which will not be done until shortly before the figure is placed on the base.

 

Overall the figure turned out pretty good.  The great casting made painting it much easier and using oils over an acrylic base coat allowed me to achieve some nice subtle transitions between the different tone and shades.  It should go well with the Dr.I. 

 

[Greif8]

I have also been working on the 1/10 scale bust that came with the kit.  Busts really don't have an LSP application so I am on the fence about posting a series of in progress/SBS photos.  So I will ask here if you guys would like to see how I am painting the bust?

 

Ernest

[MikeMaben]

This is the department of education Ernest, go ahead.

[Greif8]

3 hours ago, MikeMaben said:

This is the department of education Ernest, go ahead.

 

Hi Mike, thank you for your interest in the topic.  I was not sure how a SBS for a bust would be recieved; again something like that is not really related to LSPs unlike 1/32 figures.  Hopefully a few folks will get something out of it.

 

Ernest

[quang]

1 minute ago, Greif8 said:

.  I was not sure how a SBS for a bust would be recieved; again something like that is not really related to LSPs unlike 1/32 figures.

On the contrary, I think a bust is a great introductory way to learn painting a full figure. Talking from my own experience.

[Greif8]

A few on this forum have expressed interest in seeing how I paint the bust that I talked about above, so here we go.

 

Step one was to prime both the head and body in black.  This gives the following coats of paint a warm tone; I could have also primed the leather in grey or white resulting in colder tones which work for different types of leather.  I let the primer coat dry for an hour and than sprayed base colors for the flesh and cap using Tamiya acrylics.  The two parts were then set aside to for a day to cure.

 

I mixed a very slightly tanned looking flesh color using the base colors from the Abteilung 502 flesh set.  You can also get a nice tanned looking skin tone by mixing Yellow or Gold Ochre, a small amount of Burnt Sienna, and believe it or not a bit of orange; and than adjusting the result with a tiny bit of white to get the final tone you want. The colors you see on the palette below can be mixed to make a great many flesh tones from porcelain to ebony, using white in some case which is not shown.

  

I plan to try and paint the face using just the base color, one shadow tone and one highlight tone.  Painting a large scale figure is both easier and harder than their smaller cousins.  It is easier as you have a far larger area to work with and don't need the extra fine brush tip control than for 1/32 or 1/35 scale figures.  It is harder because you are using a lot more oil paint and it is very easy to get brush marks if you don't watch what you are doing.  I painted a very thin base coat to avoid the brush marks issue and to keep the faint underlying light and dark areas which will be highlighted with the shadow and highlight oil color later.

 

I than started painting the eyes; painting those in a large scale are much involved.  To avoid the "pop-eyed look" I did not paint the whites of the eyes white; they were painted a very light grey.  I used thinned Lifecolor paint for this task.  Using acrylic paint allowed me to do two steps one after the other.

  

I then mixed an acrylic wash using Lifecolor red.

 

This was applied with a very fine tipped pointer brush in the creases of the edge of the eye.  More color was added at the inner corner of the eye.  You can see the wash is really more of a pink color when applied over the light grey, and that is what you want.

 

I mixed a medium shadow tone using the technique that I have described a couple of times already, so I will spare everyone with yet another description of that process.  The shadow tone was applied to the areas that already show a shaded look.  Unsurprisingly, these areas are exactly the same as those on smaller scale figures; they are just larger.  To achieve the transition of the shadow tones I applied the paint slightly thicker in the deeper part of the shadow areas and then successively added two or three lighter coats outwards from there.  The paint was than blended to get a smooth transition.  Remember - oil paints lighten and balance out when they dry - so what looks abrupt and garish when wet will look quite good when dry.  Experience is your guide here.  Large figures like this bust are more challenging than smaller scales because the realitively large areas have to be both applied correctly and there are more blending steps.  On the other hand you don't have to be as nearly precise with your brush control as I mentioned earlier.

 

The single highlight tone was added only to the highest areas of the face.  I wanted to be sure to avoid applying too much highlighting which would have given the face a far too pale look.  I added the highlights just like the shadows with the major exception that I only put down the highlight tone in a single area and carefully blended that outwards to get a smooth transition with the other tones.

 

The head will now be set aside to dry.  I will finish the eyes in the nest installment.

 

Ernest

Edited March 5, 2023 by Greif8

[Greif8]

To paint the leather jacket I am going to try a slight variation of the technique used by Julian Conde, a master level figure painter from South America.  The first step was to airbrush a Tamiya Red Brown leaving a very faint trace of the balck showing thorugh.

 

After the acrylics cured for 24 hours a fairly heavy coat of Abteilung 502 Shadow Brown was brushed on and this was than wiped off using a lint free dry wipe.  I used Kemtech wipes but any lint free material will work as long as it is soft as well as lint free.  I did the wiping process in two steps, first gently wiping the paint off in one area using one to two strokes.  You don't want to wipe much more than that many times, maybe once or twice more, to avoid buffing the surface and making it too shiny.  After the figure has had its first pass, the paint in the deeper spots is brushed outwards and the figure is wiped down again as I described above.

 

 

After the Shadow Brown has been applied and partly wiped off.

 

Next Burnt Sienna is applied and the process is repeated; I did three cycles of wipe, brush paint out of the deeper areas and re-wipe.

 

The final look; I'll let this dry and than take a few photos of where we stand before I execute the next step.

 

[Greif8]

The 1/32 figure of von Richthofen is finished.  The oil paints gave the boots a nice leather look with a faint satin sheen when they dried.  I painted the Geschwaderstock a medium brown acrylic color and gave that a light oil wash made from a mix of Burnt Sienna and Yellow Ochre.  After that had cured a day I added a light coat of Tamiya Clear Yellow.  Hopefully some of you got something out of my discription and photos that I made for painting this figure; it being yet another small variation of combining acrylic and oil paints.

 

Ernest

 

 

[Greif8]

I have also finished the eyes and flesh areas of the head for the 1/10 scale bust.  The flesh areas balanced out nicely when the oil paint dried giving the face subtle transitions between the base color and the highlights and shadows.  I am not a high contrast painter, so my transitions are not as sharp and vivid as those painted by folks who do use that technique and are good at it. 

 

I did not paint the irises and pupils of the eyes.  I have had a set of Archer Fine Transfer eyes that I have wanted to try for some time now and the bust was perfect for that.  After measuring the distance between the upper and lower lids of the eyes I chose a size from the Archer set that allowed me to cut a tiny part of the upper and lower round section away.  As actual pupils are slightly covered be the lids of the eyes it is important to make sure that you get that effect on a figure's eyes as not doing so does not look very convincing and also gives the figure's expression a shocked or frightened look.  I ended up darkening the whites of the eyes even more as they did not give the look I wanted as originally painted.  I think the Archer products look quite good, even in the close up shots here; further away they look even better. 

 

I am ready to move on to painting the hair and eyebrows, and then finishing the cap.

 

Ernest

 

Sorry for the slightly out of focus shot!

 

[Furie]

Ernest, the Zidane of figure painting.

 

Edited March 7, 2023 by Furie

[Greif8]

I finished the bust today.  I had planned to document each remaining step; however, the several of the photos did not turn out.  I bumped a setting on the camera and did not realize I had done so until finishing several steps so the following will be an incomplete SBS.

 

The oil paints completely dry.  They give the jacket a nice leather look as is, but I wanted to bring out more depth, so I decided to drybrush a couple of colors.

 

Oil paint dry.

 

Mixing the first highlight color.  I added a drop of retarder to the paint to allow me enough time to drybrush it.

 

The jacket after the Leather Brown shade above was drybrushed.

 

The cold leather highlight mixed and ready.

 

And drybrushed onto the higest points of the jacket.

 

Colors mixed to paint the blond hair and that color painted on the figure.  Unfortunately it was after the second photo that I bumped a button on the camera resulting in several photos being too underexposed to use.

 

Sadly I lost the photos that showed how I finished the officer's cap, painted the Feldgrau tunic and the Blue Max.  I also ended up re-shooting photos of the finished bust, but it was not possible to document the remaining steps I did to get there - bummer.  At any rate enjoy the photos of the finished bust and let me know if you have any questions concerning the techniques and methods I used to paint it, as well as any critques.  I will post better shots when I have completed the Dr.I build as the bust goes along with it.

 

Ernest

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 8, 2023 by Greif8

[mozart]

Ernest, my apologies! I have taken my eye off the ball regarding your excellent and informative figure painting tutorials, however having just read through the von Richthofen figure in particular I can see several points that I will need to note in my next figure, which isn’t a million miles away. Thanks my friend. 

Edited March 8, 2023 by mozart