Brom Part 2

This past weekend I started painting the 54mm scale dwarf from Enigma.  I've been in a bit of a painting rut the last few weeks, but I think this project has broken me out of it.  I had a plan for the scene, but I've been racking my brain on what do with the colors on the dwarf.  He's got a random mix of equipment on him, different, materials, and some sections I'm not even sure what they're supposed to be.  So I didn't have a clear vision of how I wanted paint the figure.  After looking at a variety of other versions (this dwarf and others), I decided to go with a triadic color scheme of orange, green, and purple.  Maybe not the most common scheme, feels a little like the joker depending on how you do it.  But I'd used the same scheme on the samurai.  My though is to bring the orange in through the hair and then rust/weathering.  For the cloth, I'll do a pale green.  And then I can add some purple here and there (in the skin, in some of the armor sections, etc).  With the random hodgepodge of equipment, I felt I needed a clear color scheme or else the piece could end up looking like a mess.

I began with the part that I had the clearest vision on, the face.  Most of it is hidden by the beard, so that ends up being as much a focal point as the face itself.  For the hair, I did a base of Ruddy Leather with Walnut Brown for any sections that needed particularly dark shadows.  I then worked from Ruddy Leather up to Secret Weapon's Orange Rust and then Burnt Orange.  I did the final highlights with Fair Skin Highlight (I like using skin tones to highlight the hair, do the same for brown hair).  I tried to really concentrate the highlights there there'd be more shine.  So I picked essentially a ring around the hair on the top of his head for the highlight placement, with the strongest highlights towards the front.  The shape of the beard is like the side of a circle, so the highlights naturally should be at the top.  Getting lighter towards the face also helps direct the focus up there.

On the cloth around the head, I used some glazes of Carnage Red and Walnut Brown to build up the blood stains.  On both the cloth and the face I deviated from my traditional glaze approach.  Instead of using inks in a cup/well palette, I took regular acrylics and mixed them with matte medium and water directly on my wet palette.  Normally the consistency of glazes make them impossible to use on a regular palette.  But the matte medium makes them more viscous and prevents them from flowing all over the palette, while at the same time making them very transparent.  It also allows me to mix colors more easily for the glazes.  I wanted different shades of red in the blood stain (darker where it was more concentrated, lighter out towards the edges).  It's not how I plan to do all my glazing, but it's something worth playing around with.  From time to time, like here, it comes in handy.

Here's a couple close ups of the face.  Under the eyes, instead of using my regular skin tone and then adding glazes, I went with purple mixed directly into the skin tone.  I want a strong color and to be able to control it, so more purple in the shadows and less in the highlights.  The rest of the face was a traditional skin mix (Chestnut Brown, Rosy Shadow, Fair Skin, Fair Highlight, and Pure White).  Then some glazes of red in the cheeks and on the nose.