Uhaan Solban - The road to GD
A couple of months back I previewed my entry build for Golden Daemon with this White Scars Dreadnought positioned in a sitting meditation pose. Now it's time to get in gear and start painting it! This will follow my scheme of the ivory white, set over a heavily green tint as many of you are quite familiar with it right now. With the airbrush sketch set, I've now started to paint over it with the brush and take those colours towards refinement.
Painting white is honestly always a bit nerve-wracking, and part of my delay in painting this dreadnought is the thoughts of fucking up and ruining the finish. I have to get over these stupid excuses by grabbing other projects instead of this and saying, "I'll start next week". But once I got settled into putting my colours on the palette, lighting some incense, putting on some ambient nature sounds and just starting the process of stippling. Soon after that fear would wash away and I'd get lost in the process.
The first part I painted was the bottom half of the torso. Because a part of painting this is actually to discover how to paint it! I went into this with a few key ideas, and then I would apply a few bags of techniques in my toolkit and start to work. First by reviewing the light sketch I have made, looking at where the values fall under both on the model as well as having the image opened on my phone in front of me at the desk. Doing the shadowed underside was also safer as it's not in direct light, so I can afford to make some mistakes there with little touch-up errors and not ruining the finish.
Speaking of Stippling, the reason I've approached this is to create texture. The concept of the green started initially as a sort of bounce ambient light but has evolved into the very properties of the Ivory armour colour itself. Now with a more specific reference to Chinese porcelain pottery that's tinted in a jade/ivory colour. The pattern I need to create with the brush is to give interest across these large surfaces. Later I'll be giving them a glossy finish much like glazing of pottery over the slightly rough texture completed with cracks.
The upper torso was then tackled along with a splash of gold in the decorative tubular trim running through the lower half. This gold I wanted to get in there to act as a visual reference and something to gauge value against as well. Also being a part in which I was much more familiar with painting to use as a guide. After the upper half, I put down the brush and decided to take some pictures and study my references further. With this, I discovered that I was using too much Ivory and needed to tone this down. The initial idea was following my light sketch value, but contrasting this back to my reference, I was going too bright and I was losing some dynamic contrast and shape of the torso. Bringing the photograph and reference into Photoshop was very helpful, as I sampled the colours in the reference, labelled them, and made notes on the distance and where these values fall in the piece. Even making a rough paint-over on one side of the Dreadnought image to see the contrasting values.
I think once I complete this, I'll then be able to take what I've learned and continue this through the rest of the ceramic jade/ivory armour and film it for you Patreon x Pro Palette members in a detailed tutorial! Hope you enjoy the process, and I'm happy to include you all in this special piece for myself and Golden Daemon!