Armour of darkness
Armour of Darkness
Horus Ascended continues, and now with the second tutorial up and ready for its release following this update, he's come quite far in it's progress. From the Red SL (source lights), to the eye of horus emblems, his armour is nearing completion minus the arms. To help you further understand the process of painting his armour and gold detail, I've laid out some points and further reference that will include the red source light. It's much more for theory and light placement, where the next part in the tutorial series will go more into those specifics.
The emphasis is on creating circular spots of highlight and keeping the areas small, especially in the gold nmm. There is another important reason behind all this. It's being able to fit in the red light that will be eminating from below that both gives strong chroma of red and to help further illustrate the shapes of the armour itself. In order to illustrate volumes such as his legs, shoulders etc; we need to have light and shadow working together. Bringing highlight to the apex of the shapes to where the light is most intense, as well as dark shadow areas to illustrate the curvature of the face as it curves away from the light. If we illustrate the shape in any single value, (highlight, shadow, midtone), the model will appear flat and dull. Not the dynamic lighting we want at all! Having a balance between light and shadow naturally gives us contrast, and contrast is what gives our subject interest and definition. Back to why its important to create these highlights small and to leave room for the red is so that these lights do not overlap! Our neutral light (aka general highlights making our blacks go into greys, and our golds more ochre and bright yellows) coming from above is just as much of a Source Light as is the red from below. In miniature painting we tend to separate the neutral light/zenithal from OSL (commonly referred as Objective Source Light) as two different things entirely. But its more useful to think of them both as just light sources. I would challenge you to think of them as being able to place/rig them anywhere you please. Some areas will be better than others, but all should be placed to better illuminate and be aethetically pleasing. If we were to overlap or have these two sources of light share the same highlight points, we would get a confusing mess and/or likely make the overall area too bright. Making little room for shadow, and we will in turn loose contrast. No contrast, no shape, no interest, no definition etc.
Finally as to why I didn't just put in the red simultaniously when painting the black and gold armour? The simple answer is that I like to nail down the primary lightsource first or key light as I also like to refer. This makes the process easier to construct as I don't compound the complexity with secondary and rebounding lights in the same stage. Even without the red OSL, I would still do this and when it comes to filling in the areas on the left and right of the primary highlight, I could make these secondary lights of lower value and possibly in a temperature shift to more orange, or even cooler with some green as a glaze over. I can be flexible in the working moment even though I did have a strong idea with the red coming into the project. But if there is one thing I don't like to do is Marrying your first idea! I like to leave a bit of room for new discovery and open to ideas both of my own and feedback from a few friends.
I hope thats a little insight into the current progress of Horus, with light values and my creative process. Thanks again for checking it out and hope you keep coming back for more updates!
