Hello Everybody,

Well after taking a somewhat non-deliberate hiatus from painting for well over two years now, I've finally been able to get back to painting. Essentially, at that time, I had some pretty momentous life changes take place (all for the much, much better), and one of them included leaving my home for well over 20 years in Philadelphia, PA for well... what I'd consider to be a much, much better place. The only downside to all this excitement has been not being able to paint. Now that things have settled and quieted down, I've finally been able to get back to it! (It also didn't help that it's almost impossible to get decent furniture where I'm at now, and the desk for my office/studio took well over a year and a half to finally arrive at the new house.)

Prior to taking my extended vacation, I painted a long series of ancient Greek subjects, and after unpacking and re-organizing the grey army, it turns out that I still have some of them left. This time, it's a series of Spartan hoplites from Big Child Creatives. They're normally known for more fantasy type figures, but I liked that their first foray into a more historical realm had some highly dynamically posed Spartans. Here they are:





While I will be painting all three together, for the purposes of this and subsequent posts, I'll just be focusing on the guy in the middle, the "Noble".

Here he is all prepped and ready for assembly:



As can be seen, everything is well cast and it went together very nicely. Very little prep work required. Once assembled they were all primed black, and then again with white, giving them the classic "zenithal" lighting:





Since I paint with oils, the first thing after priming them is giving them all a good acrylic basecoat. When using acrylics to basecoat for oils, here are a few things I like to keep in mind:

• I don't feel the need to be particularly neat when doing this stage. For me the point is to make sure I get the entire model and all of its details covered. As such, the basecoating exercise shouldn't be too time consuming - it should be fairly quick.
• You should make sure that you do enough coats/layers to get even, completely opaque coverage. None of the primer should be showing though, and nothing should look blotchy or inconsistent.
• From a color standpoint, I try to use the similar but darker colors for each of the different areas I'm going to paint. I never concern myself with an exact match or anything like that. As long as the basecoat color is a little darker than the oils, you're fine.
• For which ever are your preferred acrylics, it definitely pays to use ones that dry to a very matte finish - the more matte the better.

With that in mind, the following paints where used:


These are fairly new-ish paints from Liquitex. Liquitex calls them "Acrylic Gouache", but essentially they're just very opaque and very matte acrylic paints... which is exactly what your want for your basecoats (at least if you plan to use oils). They are very, very good, and I like them a lot. (Golden has a similar line of paints called SoFlat Matte that look very promising as well).
Here is the figure (and other parts) completely basecoated and now ready for the actual painting to start:

The following mixes were used:

• Skin tones: Lots of yellow ochre, a little bit of red oxide, and an even smaller amount of ultramarine blue, then titanium white was added to lighten the tone a little bit.
• All metal parts where a mix of yellow ochre, burnt umber, and dioxazine purple.
• All leather parts where just plain burnt umber
• All red fabrics where a mix of primary red, burnt umber, and dioxazine purple.

The following brushes were used as well:


Nothing fancy, just plain cheap synthetic brushes (actually almost 99% of what I do uses cheap brushes).

So with this all finished, all the boring and tedious prep work is complete and we can now actually start painting In the next post we'll cover all the skin tones and areas of the figure.
As always, thank you for reading.
Regards,
Phil

PS - for the curious, here are some pics of where I've moved to...

Well, you couldn't have picked a better set of figures to run with, these are beauties. These together would make for a really dynamic vignette. Ruck On, Phil.

Good to see you back at the bench.
Looking forward to your work on these.

Adrian

Phil good to see you back at the bench and with this action packed trio, very helpful and well informed SBS, in anyones book I would say that you have come back with a BANG, looking forward to following this.
TERRY

Phil,I'm glad you're back to the brushes, that's good news for everyone, looking forward to seeing progress with the oils.
Santi.

Hello Everybody,

First off, thank you everybody for the kind words! I really appreciate them . Yes, I'm very glad to be back to the bench and painting. With that said though, boy... I'll definitely need to get some of my muscle memory back.

So let's get to the next steps... For this post, the focus will be on painting the exposed skin areas. From this point on, everything will be done exclusively in oils. With that said, I should state a disclaimer up front:

• There are many different ways to paint figures using oils. None are better or worse than any other, it's solely based on what works for you. The approach taken here is one I enjoy very much - but I don't do it this way for every figure I paint.
• I'm not going to impart any original or unique wisdom here - all of this material is covered on many, many posts here and in articles elsewhere on the web by painters far, far more qualified than myself. So I apologize upfront for boring you with information that you either know or have read prior.

OK, with that out of the way... Here is the outline of the basic approach:

1. Basecoat the entire area when painting in your mid-tone. Once covered, wipe your brush off and go over the entire area again with your clean brush taking off any excess oil paint. Feel free to do this several times. When finished, you'll have a very nice, thin, even coating of oil paint on the surface.
2. Apply highlight tones, and then blend them in.
3. Apply shadow tones, and then blend them in.

This approach is generally referred to as "wet-in-wet" (or for the fine artists amongst us, Alla Prima). This is (obviously) due to the fact that all your painting is done on top of a wet oil base layer. (As opposed to directly painting on top of the acrylic layer - which is a very popular approach too.) Anyway, this is how we're going to paint every part of the entire figure.


Let's take a look at the palette:


The paints used were a mix of Old Holland, Schmincke Mussini, and Williamsburg Oils brands. Honestly any brand that is of artists quality will work is fine. The colors above will be what we're going to use to mix up our skin tones. The following mixes were used:

• Mid-tone: Yellow Ochre with a bit of Light Red. Once there was a reddish tone established, I then added a tiny, tiny bit of Cobalt Blue - this will desaturate the tone a little bit. Then I added a bit of Titanium White to lighten the overall tone.
• For highlight tones, I added more Yellow Ochre, and then started adding little bits of Titanium White.
• Shadows were mixed by adding more Burnt Sienna to the mid-tone, and then finally adding Burnt Umber, and tiny bits of Cobalt Blue.

The whole thing looks like this:

Honestly, mixing these tones is pretty arbitrary... I just mix stuff up until I get something close enough to what I'm looking for. Being ancient Greeks, I wanted tones that were on the warm and ruddy side. Not a very rigorous approach, but easy enough.


Before I go any further I would like to make a small digression on oil paint additives and mediums. There are many that feel that you should never need to add any kind of medium/additive to your paint, and that you should use it straight from the tube (more or less). Even though oil paint can be rather thick, the idea is that you just put a little bit on your surface area, and then spread it out till it creates a nice thin layer. A perfectly correct, valid, fair, and agreeable way of thinking. I do this quite a bit. Sometimes the paint is thinned down using just a little bit of linseed oil to help it flow a little better as well. On the other hand...


There are tons of different kinds of mediums and additives for oil paints available that alter (subtly to drastically) the characteristics of straight out of the tube oil paint. Being an inveterate tinkerer, I love to play with all of this stuff, and I find experimenting with them to be a lot of fun.


You'll notice in the top right corner of my palette there is a dark yellow jelly-like substance called "Liquin Original". This is an oil paint medium derived from a set of resins typically referred to as Alkyds. Liquin is from Winsor & Newton, and has been around like, forever. There are also different flavors - there is Liquin Original (as seen on the palette), Liquin Fine Detail, Liquin Light, etc... I like the Original and Fine Detail flavors. Almost every oil paint manufacturer makes alkyd mediums but I think the best out there are from Winsor & Newton or Gamblin (Gamblin's is called, oddly enough, Galkyd).
In terms of what they actually do and help with:

• They improve the flow of the paint, and make working in a wet-in-wet style much easier
• Can make your paints more transparent (this can be good or bad depending on what exactly you trying to accomplish). The more you add, the greater the transparency. This can really help when you want to work with or make glazes with your oils.
• They can drastically reduce the drying time for oils. This for me is reason enough to use it . Liquin (and other Alkyds), aren't by any means the only way to make oils dry faster, and I'll get into some of other drying mediums in future posts.

So in many cases depending on what your doing, they can be quite helpful. Being that we're using wet-in-wet techniques, and don't want to wait a week for our paint to dry, I find they fit the bill quite nicely. OK, digression over.


Following the approach outlined above, let's take our mid-tone and completely basecoat the our figure with it - for this and all the other steps, the focus will be on the leg:

Now that the surface is completely covered with a layer of oil, we can add our highlights right on top:


From above you can see that they're just literally plopped on there right on top of the wet layer of oil paint below. There is nothing fancy at all going on here. Now that they're applied, it's time to blend them in:


In terms of the actual blending, I use a relatively soft brush, and use more of a tapping motion rather than an actual brush stroke motion (although I use those too sometimes), it just depends on the area and what I'm trying to do. If it's not a perfect blend, there is nothing to worry about, because we'll be revisiting all the skin areas later on.


With the general highlights out of the way, let's do the same thing but with the shadows - we block them in first:


Although due to the pose of the figure, there isn't a whole lot of shadows to block in for this side of this leg. Now we smooth them again:


Again, nothing fancy, and no need to get things perfect. Here is another one of the figures:


The last thing I want to mention is brushes. Here are the brushes that were used:


The brush in the middle is the brush I used to apply the initial mid-tone layer of oil paints. The brush on the right is the brush I used to apply and block in the shadows and highlights. The brush on the left is the brush I used to blend each area. As you can see they're essentially just cheap synthetic brushes. Nothing special. Oil paints are particularly brutal on brushes, and for 95% of the work, there is just no need for Winsor & Newton Series 7 or any other kind of fancy Kolinsky sable brush. You'll destroy them very quickly with oil paints. Even for most of the freehanding I do, I'm still using crappy brushes. However, in terms of cheap brushes, I really like the brushes from Princeton. Their Velvet Touch series are perfect brushes for blending and working with oils. I love them .

OK, so that wraps up this post. The last thing I want to emphasize here (as mentioned previously), is that this is not the end of the skin areas. I mentioned that there is no need for any of this stuff to be perfect at this stage, because once all the work here has dried, and I've progressed more on the figures, I'll be coming back to all the skin areas and doing a bunch of fine tuning and adjusting shadows/highlights, adding details to hand and feet areas, and using transparent colors to glaze in additional color nuances and make the skin tones a little more saturated and interesting.

This was rather lengthy, so thank you for sticking to the end

Regards,
Phil

Thanks for sharing your experiments and experience Phil. Very interesting!

Adrian

Thanks so much for sharing your process in detail. It's a pity I didn't know all of this 50 years ago when I was painting 54mm figures in oils............

I've switched to acrylics now but it's great to see in detail how you use oils. The results look great so far.

Oilers unite! Lol, Ruck On Phil, looking good from here. Blending is coming along nicely.

Thank You Adrian. I'm glad you find it interesting

Thanks Nigel - I have a lot of 54mm figures in the grey army, so you'll definitely see them painted in oils!

Thank you sir! Ruck on indeed!!

Hello everybody,

I got a little more painting done today, so I figured I'd post some more progress. Today I painted all their little skirts in red. Red seems to be a fairly popular color for ancient Greeks, so I thought I'd provide some info on my approach. This will also be the same exact way I'll be painting their cloaks (except the cloaks will have higher contrasts).

Since my last post had the information about the process, this post will be (thankfully) much shorter and focused.

Here is the palette:



Again, paints from Old Holland (Alizarin Crimson) and Williamsburg Oils (everything else) were used.

Here is the palette with all the tones laid out:



Since highlighting red can be difficult, one approach I find to be useful, is to use a darker tone than would be usual for your mid-tone. This way, you can highlight your "red" without having to go into orange or pink tones. This happens when you highlight a basic red tone with either yellow or white, respectively.

The tones:

• The mid-tone is a combination of Cadmium Red, Alizarin Crimson, and a little bit of Dioxazine Violet. Using crimson and violet tones allow you to darken your red without either desaturating it or turning it muddy.
• Shadows were mixed from the mid-tone with more crimson and violet. The deepest shadows where almost all violet with just a tiny bit of crimson.
• Highlights where pure Cadmium Red; then a combination of Yellow Ochre and Titanium White. Essentially a skin tone was mixed using the red, yellow ochre and white, and that tone was added to the pure Cadmium Red to start making highlight tones. This is one way you can avoid getting into orange and pink tones for your highlights. This combined with starting out with a darker tone can give you really nice highlights that still read as "red".

Once I figured out the colors, it became business as usual - cover everything with the mid-tone, then add highlights and blend, and then add shadows and blend - going back and forth as necessary.

Here is a WIP shot of a portion of the skirt after the initial blending:



Between the oil being wet, and the leather straps in the way - things look a little messy, but hopefully you get the drift.

Additionally, just like the skin, once everything is dry, and more of the figure has been painted, I'll be revisiting this area to adjust contrast, tweak shadow/highlight locations, and other small improvements and changes.

Of course, there are many different ways to paint red (and to shadow and highlight it to). Here are some examples of other ancient Greek figures that I've painted that have different flavors of reds (again all in oils):

• Spartan Warlord
• Spartan Warrior Bust
• Greek Hoplite
• Leonidas Bust

Thanks for reading!
Regards,
Phil

Thanks Nap - glad your enjoying!

Hello everybody,

I managed to make some more progress, so I thought I'd post an update. This time it's the leather straps and belt in the leg/waist area (not sure what they're called).

Anyway, it's just going to be some very simple, basic, leather. Here is the palette:



Since we're painting a dark leather, instead of going the mid-tone, shadow, and highlight route, we're starting with our darkest color, and then just highlighting up from there. You can see the progression of tones on the palette from left to right.

So, the first thing we did was just basecoat everything with some Burnt Umber:


Nothing very exciting. Once that was done, I put in the highlights with pure Naples Yellow. Here is what they looked like before blending them in:




This looks a) really, really sloppy, and b) way too yellow for a nice brown leather tone. Fortunately a little blending will fix both of these issues:



While it still looks a tad too yellow, it's more the photo - in real life it's far less yellow looking. The next step is adding highlights to specific edges on each of the leather strips. In addition to adding more light and detail, it also helps separate out the individual leather strips from each other. This was done with a mix of Naples Yellow and Titanium White. Looking at the palette it's the color on the far right hand side of all the different tones. These little edge highlights make quite a difference and bring it all together:


Again, in real life, the colors a little bit more muted; it will also help when everything dries.

That's it for today - next time it'll be metals...

Thanks for following along!
Regards,
Phil

This is really marvelous writing, illustration, and information! Your technique really resonates with me, at least to the point that I tend to block in colors with acrylics, then shade and highlight with oils. But I'm a-gonna try the acrylic gouache paints now!

I'm going to play the "newbie" card again, and ask: Am I correct in my assumption that - like oils - the acrylic gouache paints don't need stirring or mixing in the bottle before use?

Thanks for your help, and your generosity with your materials!

Nice figure, outstanding paint work.

Thank you for the kind words Russ; they're very appreciated.
I might be reading this wrong, but to be clear, I was just using the acrylic gouache to basecoat everything. In that regard there is no difference between them and regular acrylics. All the work done after that - such as highlighting and shading is done in oils... With that said though, as far as the acrylic gouache does go, I do like to give the bottles a quick shake before I add any paint to the palette.

I hope that helps!!
Regards.
Phil

Thanks Robert

Thanks, Phil! I get that you're using the AG for base-coating. I've been doing that with my favorite acrylics, but after seeing your work, I plan to give AG a try. I picked up a couple of bottles, but they're so much thicker than what I've been using that I didn't know if they needed to be stirred first.