WIP Saxon Warrior Part 2

I worked on a lot of the leather pieces and then painted the hair.  There's quite a bit and it was a pain in the butt to do.  Since he's a Germanic warrior I could have gone with blond hair but I didn't like the idea of light colored hair next to the dark browns of the helmet and shoulder coverings.  So I decided to make it a dark brown too, slightly darker than the surroundings.  It was based with Brown Liner and then highlighted with a mix of Brown Liner and Tanned Skin.  I've found that skin tones make a nice highlight color for brown hair.  I approached it similarly to how I did the fur pelt.  I did a pseudo drying brushing over a dark base.  It was a mix of very controlled dry brushing and going in to pick out individual hairs.  Then I did a glaze of the Brown Liner (mixed with glaze medium and water) to help bring it all together and then went back in to rehighlight, this time no dry brushing just painting individual hairs with a fine detail brush.  As I said, it was a pain.

With that finished I finally had to pick a color of the tunic.  I actually painted a small section in green, another in red, and a third in blue.  I decided I liked the blue the best so redid the whole thing with that.  I wanted a very toned down version of blue so I mixed all of the colors 50/50 with brown.  The shadows were Ritterlich Blue and Blackened Brown, midtones were Soft Blue and Basic Dirt, and the highlights were Heather Blue and Bone Shadow.  I had previously used the Blackened Brown in the leather and the Bone Shadow in the fur pelt (plus it'll be in the wrappings on the left arm and legs), so hopefully that will help tie things together.

Here is a little more detail on how I did the metal for his body armor.  The circular plate on the chest and back already had a dented texture to it so I tried to bring that out more with the placement of the highlights and shadows.  The piece around his waist was smooth so I used a somewhat more random application of shadows and highlights to create some texture for it.  Below is a breakdown of the how I did the circular plate on his chest.  Starting on the left is a base coat of Brown Liner. You can still see some primer peaking through but the metallic layers will fix that. The next image is my dark metallic base. I'm using Scale 75's Necro Gold mixed with Reaper's Imperial Purple (an idea I got from MassiveVoodoo). The metallic paint is dark but mixing it with a dark flat color (whether purple, dark brown, black, etc) helps take down the shine. I want my dark layer to stay dark even when the light hits it. From there I layer in my brighter metallic tones. Into the Necro Gold + Imperial Purple I mix in Elven Gold (your standard bright gold). At maybe 2 or 3 parts Elven Gold to 1 part Necro+Purple I start to mix in Thrash Metal instead. It's a little hard to describe the color, you can check the Scale 75 website, but I'd say it's a pale bronze. Lighter than the Elven Gold but less yellow. It fit what I wanted and was used for the top highlights and edges. That's the third image. The final step was to go in with some glazes for the shadows. I used layers of Brown Liner, Pure Black, and a just little turquoise, all mixed with Glaze Medium and water.