Knight Part 3, 4, 5, 6

Wow, so I've been pretty behind with posting here.  I didn't realize it'd be so long!  Well, let's try to quickly catch up...

After finishing the basic color on the surcoat, I took on the leathers.  Here a big focus is the texture, in addition to lighting.  It's an area I feel like I've struggled with for a while, but am finally starting to feel comfortable painting the leather sections on my figures.

Next I did the design work on the front of the surcoat.  My plans for this figure changed along the way.  In the end, I settled on a griffin image (found it in a reference on English heraldry from the 1200s, but switched up the colors to match this figure).  The approach started with a simple sketch before filling in the pattern and then adding the final details.

After that, I took on the shield.  Obviously I used the same design as the chest.  But, since the shield gave me more room to work, I went into greater detail.  Here's how that design progressed:

And, just the other day, I had a bit of time and decided to take on more of the metals.  I focused on the helmet.  I approached it more through stippling.  I started with a dark undercoat and applied some brown tones on top of the black (broken up).  This will be mostly covered up, but will still show through in spots.  Then I started with a dark metal (Scale75's Heavy Metal + Reaper's Pure Black).  This was applied all over, but through stippling rather than a complete layer.  Thus the underlying color still showed though in areas.  I then started lighting the metal (more metallic, less black) and applied lighter and lighter layers through stippling.  I concentrated the dots in the areas I wanted more light reflected.  On edges I did use some long, continuous strokes.  But even these I tried to break up a bit to give the surface a more uneven look rather than appearing too smooth.  The benefits of the stippling approach are two fold.  First, it gives you a beaten sort of texture to the armor.  Second, it helps create some blends without being true blends.  I find metallics hard to blend, but the grey metals are especially troublesome.  A section might look like it has a decent transition, but it's being hidden by how the metallic paint reflects the light.  Turn the figure and change the light angle, and all of a sudden that smooth transition looks anything but.  So stippling helps create the look of a blend without being a true blend and, for me, helps avoid the trouble I was having before.

And with that, we are back up to the current state of the figure.  I need to continue on with the metals for the chainmail.  The stippling won't quite work there, so I'll have to play around a bit to figure out my approach.