Avatars of War Orc WIP 2

The first area I painted was the skin. The basic principle I had in mind was to keep the paint thin, so that some of the underlying shading provided by the priming stage would show through. I am not sure this really happened, but it did help to have the areas of light and shade sketched in.

Stage 1 : Base Coat

The base colour for the skin, or rather the mid tone, was Vallejo Camouflage Green. I applied this thinly, I wanted the primer to show through slightly.

Stage 2 : First Shade

The next step was to apply the shading more neatly, using a mix of the base colour plus a darker green, Vallejo Flat Green. Again, I was hoping that the thin colours and the underlying primer shading would help here, but by now most of the underlying primer colours had been obscured by the layers of paint.

Stage 3: Second Shade

The third stage was to reinforce the shading. I added a brown colour, Coat d'arms Leather Brown, into the shading mix and applied this thinly in the deeper recesses.

Stage 4: Basic Highlights

The final stage for this session was to add some initial highlights. For this I turned to an excellent video guide by the ultra talented Ben Komets on the Painting Buddha youtube channel - check it out here. I tried to apply the paint using the wet in wet technique, not as expertly as in the video but I thought it worked out quite well for a first try. One of my great painting faults is to keep everything too subtle, so this time I am trying to keep quite sharp contrasts between light and shade. My instinct is that it's too much, muscles do not have sharp highlights like that on the left leg, but I will probably smooth it over with a glaze or two later.

That's all I managed in this session of about 90 minutes painting. The underlying shade and highlight provided by the primer has been useful - not so much in the obvious places where you would naturally put your shade colours, like in the creases of the abdomen, but more in the areas where light transitions to shade at a gradual level - the upper and lower outstretched arm is a good example of this.