RtC: More B&W Research

More progress, and I messed around a bit with my makeshift pictures process too. As you can see, the dwarf now has his head attached. I've also started working on a base for him as well, but no pictures yet since it's still in a lot of pieces. One of the really challenging things about painting this model in just B&W is getting the right look to various surfaces and implying texture without the use of color. More B&W photo research done this week. Here's a couple new items.

This poster of the grill of a GTO is a very interesting reference. The chrome is really bright. I used the Color Inspector plugin for Firefox and looked through some of the values. It goes right up to max white. Even the "dark" parts are still at 60+% on the brightness scale. The one challenge of this as a reference is there's obvious reflection of subjects in the chrome. It's hard to see, but it throws off the reflectivity study a bit. Still though, there's good value in seeing how metal goes from very bright to medium grey in a very short distance.

Photo not available, please click Unfortunately the gallery here prevented me from embedding a thumbnail of the image so you'll have to click and follow the link. It's a bunch of bladed weapons stacked up. This is a really useful reference photo. I think it definitely fills it's 1000 words quota without me saying more.

This Dire Troll Mauler was painted in black and white and is pretty interesting. I'm pretty sure this guy used an airbrush for large parts of it. Not that I'm against airbrushes (since I own one myself), but it definitely helps with the smoothness on the larger surfaces. I'm obviously in no position to use an airbrush on this much smaller dwarf. Still though, this model is a fascinating example. It got a 8.2 rating on CMON. Out of all the reference photos I've been looking for, this one is probably the most relevant in terms of learning something from. I could easily spend time picking this one apart but here's my top 2 observations. First, the difference between the rocks on his back and his flesh reads quite well as 2 different materials. Second, the highlighting on this model is all over the place and makes it hard (for me) to tell where the implied light source is supposed to be coming from. Both are good things to keep in mind when I work on my project.

That's it for this installment. I've got some other random posts on the way in the next few days as a bit of a break from just RtC updates on this project.