First Livestream Session Review
The past Thursday I hosted my first Livestream for my Patreon x Pro Palette members on our Discord with relative success! The painting went well, despite my challenging times with OBS which loves to fail me on the day of the stream for a second time in a row. But otherwise, let's get into what was done to this fantastic Goblin Mercenary from https://www.spiramirabilisminiatures.com
Starting from a black primer with lights sketched out with Tamiya flat white through the airbrush. This has been my preferred method of working off a lighter base coat. This does help in reducing the amount of layers and giving our colours more vibrancy. When starting with the goblin's skin, the idea here is to work rough and steadily refine as we move forward. This is done on the palette by pre-mixing the shadows, mid-tone and highlighting colours but still leaving room to be flexible. It's more of a mindset that we don't need to be married to our initial tones, and it so happens that where my initial intention was to highlight more with Pistachio (Cooler green/yellow). I moved into mixing more sunny skin tones into the highlights to gain a bit more warmth and temperature contrast. As for a general sequence, a wash of green over the entire skin was applied to tint the white to get a bit of colour in there to both see details and help into the base colour applications down the line. See the little goblin to the right for what this looks like.
It's then blocking in shadow, mid-tone, and first highlights with values in loose dabbing brush strokes with a size 1 brush with a little bit of dilution (25%). This dabbing motion which is much like large stippling produces a softer mark. Pairing this with some line brush strokes either riding along the harder features of the face (wrinkles), and also pulling in rounded features going towards the highlight. Then it's weaving in bridge mixes between the values as well as glaze applications to help transitions before proceeding to further refine shapes. Keeping the centre of each volume densely packed while leaving the transition outer edges ragged to both help illustrate the rough leathery nature of his skin and the wrinkles that cover his face. Emphasizing the model's physical sculpted features as well as adding my own. Keeping things loose early on will help develop some natural skin roughness which I can either patch to make smooth, or we can leave and highlight these features to develop into the rough features you see.
Taking a break from the skin, Josh pressed to have the cloth started on! A good example as it surrounds the face and having another colour/material will help us read the colours of the skin better for when we return to it and refine it further. Placing the highlights was pretty simple as these folds are much like an accordion with alternating volumes facing the light, then the next in shadow and so forth. Following our highlight of the face to line up vertically with the cloth to give it continuity.
Filming the eyes is very tricky with a live stream as I only have a Prime Lens to film, and of course, the nature of the eyes itself is hard. This model doesn't make it any easier due to the very recessed eyes. I will probably paint this off-camera and provide a step by step photographs to help guide you. I had a great time painting with everyone who attended, answering questions and sharing an uncut painting pace. Which was covered in about 3 hours I believe. I'll be posting a few dates to vote on the next live stream for your patrons on Discord and continue this piece. Painting the shadow side of his face, and getting that helmet done in some sort of NMM. I don't have any immediate plans, as this is more of an "off-the-cuff" painting process.
