Phil,

No, it was Muddy Waters, Elmore James and Howlin' Wolf!

Cheers!!

Mike

Am particularly interested in the skin tone - what mix's do you use as many modellers stear away from the very dark African skin tones generally - the whole piece is very well done.Bravo Jay.

Robin Rob, thanks for the kind words gents!

The skin tones are a mix of Raw Umber, Burnt Siena, Yellow Ochre and titanium white. Starting with mostly Raw Umber and Burnt Siena, I added progressively more white and ochre to get my highlights. These were the first African American fleshtones I've ever painted, so it took alittle experimenting to get there. I wanted the skin tones to have just a slightly cooler tone than the buffalo jacket, and the use of the Raw Umber as my base color helped me achieve that. This was a study in browns so I made sure all the tones were slightly different. I hope that comes through. Oh, and I think it's worth mentioning the lips. I used basically straight raw umber for his upper lip with only the slightest highlight added to keep it nice and dark. On his lower lip I mixed raw umber, cad red medium and a touch of white to get a nice pink tone there. Mike has done such a fine job of sculpting that the lines you see are actually sculpted into the lip. That allowed me to just follow his lead and highlight appropiately.

For the hat, I started with Yellow Ochre, to that I added a sparing amount of Raw Umber. I then added Titanium white to get my highlight colors. For the "sweat" I added more Raw Umber to the darkest mix and once the initial highlight and shadows were dry, I pushed a brush with very little paint into the nooks and cranies and slowly built up the stains until I was happy with them (basically dry-brushing). I may have reviseted each spot 2 or 3 times before I was happy. That also helped it look like several layers were built up as I got certain spots darker and darker with "stains". I also went back with a mix of white and just a touch of yellow ochre after all was dry and added the very light lines of salt stains. They are hard to see in the pics, but they added that final boundry to the sweat stains and I think help finish the nice worn look. Those were applied as very thin lines and blended down to to blend them into the stains ever so slightly. Hope that tirade makes any sense!

Thanks again gents!

Jay H.

OK folks, Mr. Good was kind enough to show me the error of my ways on this piece. He and I discussed several things before I painted this piece, one of which was the kersey cloth on the inside of the jacket. He told me gray, I proceded to paint it in tan! I had a complete mental moment, not sure why, but I did (damn age is not treating me well mentally!). He also intended for this to be a later version of shirt, thus no yellow piping on the collar. Also my photo shows the shirt as too light a shade of blue. Although it is darker in person, I have that fixed in my new attachment as well. Sorry for the mix up Mike and fellow Planeteers! I have attahced a corrected image of the piece that will be used by Thunderbird Miniatures as the official box art so as to hopefully stave off any confusion for future painters of this bust. Thanks for looking!

Jay H.

Great work Jay & Mike!

Looking forward to getting this one....

Cheers,

Steve

www.skminiatures.co.uk