The warmasters cape
Being one of my favourite elements to paint, fabrics have always given me an enjoyable challenge to illustrate volume. All the various folds, peaks, valleys, and textures which make this material unique and organic. With the warmasters cloak, this presented a tough challenge in both the size of the project and honestly in time allocation. Painting a surface in this size presents a challenge to really give a soft impression that is going to be filled with variations of firm and soft transitions, while still keeping some tight elements such as folds and the deep cavities of the cape in shadow with detail.
Painting red is one of my favourite colours, but it does present a challenge when the red is spread so far in these large areas. Most red pigment is very strong when concentrated in a small area with smaller brush strokes and more moving the puddle of paint around. Getting the right charge and consistency in your brush is more critical to get a smooth and fairly even application per layer. But as you will see in the tutorial, it still takes many many layers to get down a saturation needed. The airbrush glazing really helps out in this manner both to speed things up, but also is an excellent unifyer. As strokes with the airbrush don’t require any friction on the surface and produce a smoother result. The only backfire of the airbrush is that colours can appear more dull with its application if not taking care. It’s why I also use the brush at the beginning, switching to the airbrush for unification and glazing, then only to go back to the brush for the final highlights.
I’ve opted to not make the material more worn. Instead a bigger emphasis would be on the focal points I’ve highlighted on the cape to keep this darker atmosphere intact. If I were to have another 10-20 hours on the project I would have liked to experiment and push with more texture in the cape, but the sheer surface area was too much sadly to accomidate. Maybe if my friend wants the piece next year I’d do it for Golden Daemon :P But I don’t want to pressure him on that choice, he did pay very good money for this already!
In the golden emblem and trim of the cape, the method is taken from the Armour of Darkness method of the gold NMM. The nice part of doing the red first is that you now have a light volume template to match when it comes to the highlight placements of the gold. Really nice n simple when this presents itself as most metallic objects are the body focus of the volume (Armour pieces). If there is one difference in this gold on the fabric in compared to the gold on the trim, its the stroke finish. In the robes I’ve opted to use much more rounded strokes, with blending and bridges with little circles and rounded brush marks, rather than the stiffer straighter lines found in the armour. This small change gives the gold on the cloak a more organic feel which is already present on the sculpt. We should always look to use our stroke in a compliment of the shape we are painting on. Speaking of that, this talk about brush strokes is whats coming up next on the Pro Palette Fundamentals Series! More on that to come!
With those words I’ll leave you with the cape images for your reference and enjoyment! Thanks again for following the process of Horus and I hope this brought you a little more insight into its creation.
