Great results so far and a great SBS too.

Oda.

Fantastic work... Thanks again for sharing this great SBS!!!

Cheers Borek

Hey all, I took a bit of a break from this figure, but now I'm back and hoping to finish it up soon! On the last post, I'd just finished doing the design work on his surcoat. Following that, I took on the shield. I used the same basic design but, since the shield gave me more room, I was able to put more detail into the image. The most recent work has involved tackling the metallic portions of the piece. Metals are something I'm not quite happy with, so I've been experimenting with my approach. In this case, I decided to ditch the light and dark metallic colors and stick with just a medium shade. Then I added matte colors to create the shadows. This took down the shine/reflectiveness of the metal while also darkening it. Normally I'd do this using the dark metallic shade, but doing it with the medium metallic created a better balance of shade color and matte-ness in my opinion. For the highlights, I mixed in my light color (though keeping a good deal of the metallic too). This was a bit trickier to make work, but had the effect of keeping the highlights where I wanted them no matter what the room lights were doing. Another change to my approach was using more stippling with the metallics when I had larger surfaces (like the helmet and axe head). This helped with the blend and made them look like they had some surface texture.



I still have to finish the chainmail and take care of a few last small details on the figure. Then all that will be left are the base and some final weathering.

I'm not sure if you've covered this before, but do you use water to thin your Acrylic paints? Or is there something better to break the surface tension? Enjoying all the helpful advice your passing on to us.

Thanks! I just use water. I work mostly with Reaper paints, which I find to be a bit thinner out of the bottle than Vallejo. One of the reasons I prefer using them, for my style of painting they seem to work well with less effort by me. But I still add a bit of water to get the consistency I want.