Updates below - April 16th, 2012
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I'm painting this 54mm figure from Andrea as a retirement gift for a coworker (shhhhh... it's a surprise!). The Andrea box art has him painted as a Hospitaller, but I'm going to make him a Templar instead. Only the head is complete. I might give the shaved area on the top of his head a slight brown tint so it looks like there is stubble (thoughts?). What you see is about a day's worth of painting, all done with acrylics.

It's a little hard to see the eyes in the above pictures, so here's a zoomed in version. Adding the pupils was a pain but I think the end result is nice (even if most people will never look close enough to notice... sigh).

great start on an excellent and thoughtful gift.

What a great gift! Also a very nice figure.
It looks as if you have a little shadow of hair behind the ears and upper neck. You may want to do the upper scalp to add more symmetry to the 3 day shadow. Just a thought.

Great gift. And it's a great start on it.

Marc

Looking good so far David.


Cheers David

I had a chance over the last few days to work on my Templar. I've seen a few threads recently discussing the difficulties in painting white, so I thought I'd share what I have done. All of the white is done with Vallejo Model Color acrylics.

Deepest Shadow: German Cam Black Brown (822) and German Cam Beige (821)
Shadow: German Cam Beige (821) and Deck Tan (986)
Base: Deck Tan (986)
Highlight: White Grey (993) and Deck Tan (986)

The deepest shadows are used very sparingly, the majority of the shadows are the beige and deck tan mix. I was going for more of a worn off white finish, so I toned down the highlights with deck tan. If I was going for a brighter white, I might have made my base a mix of deck tan and white grey, then used white grey alone or even a mix with pure white (951) for the highlights. The main point I have gotten from all the wisdom here on PlanetFigure is that shading whites should not be done with just white - grey - black mixes.

After finishing the white I added the Templar cross. The design was done free hand.

very nice painting.

Hi Bailey
The whites look really nice. Your friend is going to love this piece.

This is really coming along, David...it will be a beautiful gift when done

Mary

That is gonna be a great gift.
Like the white, and a bit more symmetry on the cross will do the job.. On the picture it seems that the left horizontal bar is a bit lower then the right one.

Thanks everyone. I've been pleasantly surprised at how much fun this little figure is to paint.

Marc, I'll take another look at the cross in person. The knight has a slight twist to his torso, so I painted the vertical part of the cross at an angle. So the difference between left and right horizontal are caused by that. I'll give it a more critical look and see if I think it needs to be tweaked.

Finished this guy a little while ago but I've been slow in uploading the pictures. Overall this was a fun little project and all the white didn't give me nearly as much trouble as I was expecting. My only complaint was the sculpting on the chain mail left a little to be desired. Hope you enjoy the final result. Thanks for taking a look!