Primary Color painting experiment

So I placed a preview of the class on Monday.. went to sleep.. woke up and now it is Friday! Damn!!! I think I might be a bit under the weather... argh..

Anyways.. on to the short little experiment that I was put through, and pleasantly so, during Rafael's class last weekend.

The class was to focus on his style of painting, and to work with extreme contrasts. Be it with color, light/dark or matte/gloss. But to work with them all within the scope of the class. And for those to be worked on, we picked out the Savage Orc models to play around with.

I honestly cannot say that I was overly thrilled with painting it, and less so with the results that I was plagued with!

Steps forward could be seen, but the model was just not screaming to me enough ( even if he does look it! ). So I sidelined the model in order to not derail myself from the class too much. And since the class was in a gaming store, I browsed the shelves to look for a better piece to paint up. Something that had a bit of everything on it, that I could play around with.

Now it must be noted that I stopped working on the Orc on the second day around noon. Bough up a kid pirate from the Tales of War line sometime around 1230, and had him assembled and primed by about 1.

This is when Rafael realized that I was doing something different and made some comments. First comment was.. dude.. wtf!! No.. actually his first comments was your falling into old habits.. and using de-saturated and coward colors on this model.

He had a look within my paints to see what I had.. de-saturated was said a lot.. not a lot of vibrant colors there..

So he had an idea.. to see if I could make the browns that I liked playing with.. but with only using the primary colors! And we set off to pick up 3 colors from my paint box that were vibrant and saturated enough to be the primaries for this experiment.

And building off of his thoughts with regards to the color wheel he set me on a new course.

We only added the black/white paint so that I can play with the hues a bit further, but the goal was to only paint the model with these 5 colors.. Black/White/Blue/Yellow/Red... something that I have been told before can be done in a class from Massive Voodoo's beginners class.. but not something that I have actively sat down to actually do.

What was really interesting was that with the reduction of colors I was able to paint even faster! And with more freedom, as the colors I would require were there in front of me. If they dried up ( which for some reason did fairly quickly! ) I could just mix up another batch on top of the older ones.

Things like the pants were quite easy and hard at the same time. Easy cause it is basically moving from blue to yellow.. and blending and mixing the colors from one to the other.

The boots were more interesting to play around with, and the extreme yellow light was Rafael's doing more so than mine. But he began to push me to try really bright colors in the highlights and see where it would take me. And in this case it began to give me an idea of a light source ( even if not fully proper ).

But it was the skin area that I played around with the most. To get the right consistency of the colors to make it work.

The photos shown here are my 4th attempts at getting the skin just right. Or at least right enough for what I wanted to hit. Earlier versions were either too clean cut over the muscles making them look unnatural. Or were the wrong shade, and too yellow/orange in spots and dark in others.

After an hour of playing around with colors I finally found a mix that I liked. Can I repeat it? Maybe.. but I cannot say that I have a recipe for it. More like an instinct that it was what I was liking. But I can say that the white was used to help bring out the highest peaks on the skin there.

What I really like is that although this model is a bit small, it was all accomplished in about 4 hrs. While Rafael was pushing on with some lessons, I was brush deep on this piece going further and further. Painting one section at a time, until it was at the point that I liked. If I had one more hour in the class I believe I probably could have gotten all the pieces painted up, and had a better idea of the overall effect and feel for the model.

I can see now that the piece is still a bit rough, but considering that it was painted without the luxury of my normal painting desk or lamps, it is not bad. And I think more of the effect and exercise itself was more important than the final detailed results. I will attempt to finish it off in the coming weeks and see what happens. Maybe clean it up a bit more. But I also think I will attempt this exercise again at some point to see what can be done with a different combination of primary colors for it as well. Perhaps even moving into the secondary colors and see what kind of combos I can come up with on a similar piece.

Expect to see some more of this.. and would love to hear your comments below about this experiment. In the meantime.. enjoy the weekend!