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Joss! Meets an airbrush!


Sholto

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That's crazy...mind doing a tutorial someday?
A video or even photo tutorial would be an odd prospect. You would see exactly how much planning goes into a model like this (none*) and how carefully I set up each step to be a logical consequence of the last one (not at all) and how precise and repeatable are my paint mixes (Bob Ross I am not).

The one thing I did plan was tone and shade (*okay, almost none). I knew that I wanted the model to get brighter the closer it was to Joss' head. Given how dark his skin and hair were going to be, that was the only way I knew to draw attention to his face. You will notice (reds and blues aside) the further you get from Joss' face, the darker the colours are, and the closer to grey/ black they become. Tone and shade drain away.

A lot of what I am doing with the airbrush I have picked up from a Youtube channel - Buypainted. Fantastic HD videos of exciting airbrush action that can tell you what to do far more effectively that I can. I don't try and copy what he is doing there, but instead I look at what he is doing for inspiration. A few things I have learned about airbrushing models:

1. You can be much more severe with the tonal or shading steps between adjacent colours when blending with an airbrush. For example, if I was to try and blend two colours on a model with a brush, I would use lots of different layers to get the blend, and each layer would only be slightly different from the last one. But when using an airbrush you can start with one colour and then go straight to a quite different one. The natural feathering of the airbrush will take care of the gradient for you. Joss' axes go from quite a dark, navy blue to almost pure white, to take an example from this model. I painted the axes Electric Blue, washed with Asurmen Blue and then used the airbrush twice. Once with a dark navy blue and once with almost pure white. While it is true that trying to get that blend with a paint brush would have taken ages, the point I am making here is that airbrushes let you make big jumps in colour on a model, and trust that the airbrush will even it out for you.

2. Smooth colour transitions satisfy the eye almost as much as traditional shading and highlighting. This is why I think of using an airbrush as almost cheating, and is one of the things I picked up from Buypainted. Joss' shirt is not shaded and highlighted in anything like the usual way, but it draws the eye and the colour complexity is satisfying. Once I had done the three colours with the airbrush, I gave it a light wash with Gyphonne Sepia (blending in a little Devlan Mud right at the bottom and under his arms while it was still wet). Then I gave it a single highlight of VMC Ivory White just around the very top. Extremely simple and quite effective. With masking tape (I use Tamiya) you can do this sort of thing all over the model if you want.

3. You can use an airbrush to shade and highlight a model in the traditional way. It is harder and more time consuming than this colour transition method. I did this with the Guardian and Warden models. It gives a different final look, so it is a case of deciding which is best for your model.

I saw another thread where someone asked what was the best airbrush for painting models, so I might as well mention that I used an Iwata Neo for this. Lovely wee budget airbrush.

Edited by Sholto
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