Recently, I have been painting the Crusades Knight of Heaven bust which is produced by Nutsplanet. As I have made some progress and taking quite a few pictures during the process, I’d like to create this post sharing some step-by-step of my painting this bust.

First of all, here are some pictures of my progress so far.


Open Box
Like all the other busts that Nutplanets has released, this bust is another one of 1st class quality in both sculpt and casting. Nap has written a great open box review article at http://www.planetfigure.com/threads/the-crusades-knight-of-heaven-from-nuts-planet.64513/ and I am just linking to it if you want to take a close look at the parts of this bust (Thank You Nap for writing up this review article; it comes just in timeJ )

BTW, as mentioned in Nap’s review article, this bust is inspired and made based on the major character “Balian of Ibelin” in the film "Kingdom of Heaven" starring Orlando Bloom.

Head – Chain Mail Coif
I usually start from face when painting a bust. But for this bust, as the face is surrounded by chain mail coif, I started with the metal part first instead of flesh part just because the regular flesh paint can be easily covered by metallic paint but not the other way around. Just my personal preference.

I used black primer for chainmail part and white primer for face (just using some masking tape did the trick). I painted the base coat using Vallejo Model Air Steel with a bit of black added to it.

After that, I used washes of different dark colors such as Vallejo Smoke, black and a bit of dark blue to apply shades and tones on the chainmail, especially in shadow areas. I brought out highlight areas using pure Vallejo Model Air Steel and also a bit of Vallejo Model Air Aluminum. Repeat the process of pin-washing, dry-brushing edges until I am satisfied with the overall result.

A tip here is that if you are using acrylics washing on surface having a lot of very small holes and details such as chainmail, adding a little bit of liquid dish soap to the diluted wash paint helps break the surface tension of water, thus making the wash paint to flow into each small hole more easily.

Head – Face
Before painting the face, I first finished painting the eyes. A fine and sharp brush plus some patience resulted in good result.

Base Color: The base color I used for painting the face is Brown Sand + a bit Burnt Cad. Red + a bit Sunny Skin Tone.
Highlight: More Sunny Skin Tone, Basic Skin Tone and a little bit of White were gradually added to the base color/previous highlight color until reaching the final highlight which is Basic Skin Tone + a little bit of White.
Shadow: For shadow, Burt Cad. Red and Arabic Shadow (Scale75) were gradually added to the base color/previous shadow. For final shadow, I mixed a little bit of Black Brown into the previous shadow.
Tone (was added later): I used various colors for tones on face, including red, yellowish green, de-saturated blue and violet red, purple and etc. When applying tones, I applied glaze (very very diluted paint) multiple times until I am satisfied with the subtle effect.

I usually paint face by sketching out general light and shadow area roughly and then gradually increase the contrast, do blending, refine details and add tones. Below are some of the pictures I took for the progress of my painting the face (tones were not added yet at that time)

Head – Helmet
The colors used to paint the helmet are similar to what was used for painting chainmail – metallic paint, dark acrylic colors like black, black brown, smoke, dark blue and etc. I used many layers of glaze to build up shades and tones on the helmet and also dabbed the helmet using an old brush to create the worn effect, stains and a feel of irregularity.

With the helmet glued to the head, I refined some details and also added some tones to the face using glaze of colors mentioned above. Below are the pictures took at this stage for the head.


Body – Pre-shading Priming
The body of this bust is also very well sculpted with all the fold details there. In order to make shading easier, I primed the body with both black and white primers, the so-called pre-shading priming. That is - I first primed the whole body in black. I then sprayed white primer only from the front top (about 60 degrees) to simulate the lighting. As you can see from two pictures below, the body part already shows a very well defined pre-shading after black and white primers were applied.

Tip: Take some pictures of the body part at this time and save them to your computer. They will help give you very good reference of light and shadow areas for your next painting process.


Body – Achieving Symmetric Crosses
The box art of this bust by Myeong-ha Hwang looks pretty nice. So I decided to use the same clothing design – a surcoat in half white (with red cross) and half red (with white cross).

I choose a cross pattern that I found on the Internet as follows:

As there are 2 crosses I need to paint and the four edges of each of them are curves instead of straight lines, I have to ask myself the following three questions before painting the surcoat.

1. How do I make sure that both crosses are painted in exactly the same size?
2. How do I make sure that the 4 edge curves of each cross are as symmetric as possible?
3. How do I make sure the cross shape well match with the clothing folds on the surcoat?

Instead of directly drawing freehand cross patterns on the surcoat, I used some masking tape which helps address the three questions above.

The process is simple:
(1) Print out multiple copies of the cross pattern I want to use.
(2) Cover a cross with masking tape (I use a product from Tamiya) which is semi-transparent so that I can see the cross pattern through the masking tape.
(3) Use a pair of shape scissors to remove the parts that are not required.
(4) Repeat Step 2 and Step 3 to get another copy. If you mess up any copy, just try another one as you have already printed more than 2 copies of the cross pattern.
(5) And now you get two near-perfect copies of the cross pattern. Just remove the masking tape from the paper and put it on surcoat.

Below are some pictures I took for this process for your reference.


Body – Surcoat (Red, White, Fabrics)
The painting of the surcoat itself is not a very difficult task as red and white are two common colors that we usually paint. I just list some of my personal experience regarding painting this surcoat for your reference:

1. Never use pure white as base color to paint white. The base color here can be sort of yellowish or brownish white color (creamy colors). Save pure white only for the final highlight areas which are very small.
2. For the red part, I primarily used the Andrea Red Paint Set which works pretty well. I also added a few other colors for extreme shadow and light only.
3. As the surcoat is made of fabric (usually linen), make sure the result should not be satin or glossy. If you have certain acrylic colors that you know tend to have a glossy finish, adding a bit (not too much, just a bit) of Tamiya X21 FLAT BASE to your acrylics paint helps ensure a matte finish.
4. I also drew some very lines representing the texture of fabrics, usually on top of folds and in large flat areas.
5. Frequently check the pictures taken just after the black and white priming to assist your painting of light and shadow areas more precisely J

All right. Thank you for the time all the way reading through the post and arriving here. Hope this step-by-step helps to some extent. You can find some picture of my current progress at the beginning of this post.

It has really been a pleasure to paint this bust. There are a lot of other remaining and interesting things to paint for this bust, like the big sword, leather parts, wooden part of the shield and overall weathering. I will try to update this post when I have time to make more progress on painting it.

Any comments/feedbacks/critics are welcome Thanks!

Very nice work excellent tip re the masking tape too looking forward to seeing the rest Jason
Steve

Beautiful work on the face!!

I like using the mask and I think well painted eyes are the most important part of any face. Thank you for sharing.

Martin

Super work Jason, great face and nice sbs too.

Alex.

Thanks for sbs, mate. Good work!

That's really looking good. Like the SBS.
You can also buy some stencils from Tommi Warton, that will save alot of work.

Marc

Really nice. Quite a good likeness of Orlando

Lovely painting and some very good tips re the SBS

Ron

Great painting and thanks for sharing the tips.

Great SBS Jason.
Many thanks,
Keith

excellent, love the eyes, quite a soulful look.

Cheers Zane

Can't thank you enough for your great idea to share this lovelly project with us . Much appreciated!
Cheers!
Nicolae

Great tip for the heraldry, following with interest.

Great paint

Many thanks to all of you for your kind words and comments. Glad to hear that this SBS is useful. I will certainly post more after I make further progress on painting this bust.

Excellent!

Great work and sbs

Great painting ! Thank you for sharing this SBS with us. Very helpful and lots of things to try!