Gnarly (part 1)

I started working on the Gnarlhorn for Sean yesterday and figured I'd snap a pic of the progress, along with the particulars of how I did what I did (not that it's really that spectacular).

First, I primed in white. It was just easier. I've still got mixed feelings about using white instead of black on this model, but it's clearly too late now. It has helped for doing the flesh, but has introduced an additional step for doing the armor.

For the skin, i decided to go with more of a human tone rather than a darker leathered tone. Primarily because it gives me more contrast range to work with, without having to go super dark, and I also feel it will make a better match with the more beaten tarnished gold color I plan to aim for on the armor plates. The skin so far is the following steps:

1. Base coat Midlund Flesh.
2. Add some lines of MWH. The idea here was from Matt DiPietro's post on the Ask the Studio thread about how he added texture to the skin and horns.
3. Medium-thick wash of Bootstrap leather.
4. Some two-brush blending of Battlefield Brown on the lower regions of the muscles.
5. Thin wash of Ironhull Grey and Umbral Umber.
6. ...next steps are to add some highlights to the upper regions of the muscles, and then some additional shading work.

The armor is pretty basic so far. Fill in the recesses with Necrotite Green, then a wash of Iosan Green, then another wash of Gnarls Green. Both washes have a touch of flow medium in them to hep them flow into the recesses. Then I carefully went over all the raised portions (the parts to become gold) with slightly thinned black. The black is to help with the metals once I start them. I'm still thinking I might do an ink wash on them, but it's undecided at this point.



Please note, this pic is my first attempt at moving towards using Google's Picasa and Picasaweb for my photos. I'm still working out the kinks, along with the lightbox image display kinks. If you encounter problems, please leave me a comment so that I know.