In the Hall of the Mountain King Part 3

In my last post I mentioned I was about to enter new territory for my painting. Up to this point everything I have done was familiar to me. This isn't 100% true as I never did highlights with the airbrush but I am comfortable using the brush so it wasn't that big of a leap.

The first new technique I was going to try out was the use of dry pigments to shade and add variety to the skintones. I have seen this done by Schnauzerface and Les from www.awesomepaintjob.com and liked the results. A few days ago I posted some photos of some new supplies I received in the main and the pastels were for this process.

I took a few purples, blues, and red from the box and scrapped off a fine powder with my hobby knife. Here are the four I tried out. I found while applying it I preferred the color at 6 o'clock and used the colors at 3 and 9 for variety and didn't bother with 12 o'clock much at all.

I am not sure how well it came out in the photos but I was thrilled with how it added nice subtle and smooth shading. I was a little apprehensive at first but once I got it down a little I loved it and can see myself doing it more in the future. I did end up with some dry powder on my rock sections but this cleaned up really easily with a clean damp brush. At this point I gloss varnished the entire mini in preparation for my next new adventure in painting.

I have seen many tutorial on the oil wash technique and was really interested in giving it a go. I went to Hobby Lobby and picked up a few supplies to try it out. I figured I would try it on the loincloth sections first so that if I messed it up it wouldn't be too hard to redo.

The oil wash didn't turn out as well as the use of dry pigment. I think this was due to my apprehension in using the product and I think my wash was actually too dilute with not enough oil paint. I wouldn't say it came out poorly just not spectacularly. I also played with some oil wash shading on some of the cracks in the kings skin (forhead, nuckles, back).

At this time I hit the model with a coat of matte varnish....ut oh. The matte varnish came out a little "fuzzy" and really muted the nice shading done of the skin. I actually think the matte made the stones sections look better but I was worried about the skin. I painted a little gloss varnish over a small section of skin and it seems to "revitalize" the previous work so I am not too concerned as I will hit the skin with a gloss layer again to bring the skin back to life. I have bought a new bottle of matte in hopes of avoiding this issue when I do the final layer of varnish on the king.

Well the major components of the mountain king are essentially done. It is not time to do the time consuming and tedious task of detail work.....and as they say the devil is in the details.