Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Laying in the base colors

This is the stage that always looks ugliest; none of the details are in place yet, no shading or highlights, just blobs of color, which you still have to be precise about, because there is very little you can do to correct things with outlining or highlights in later stages.




This is also a stage I sort of dread because I tend to work from shell pigments, which is literally dried paint in a seashell, and mixing colors from that palette is a lot harder than working with paints in a tube or other sealed container. So I have a limited set of colors to choose from. In the picture above, the tan bridge is shell yellow ocher, the brown of the shields is a shell pigment (I think burnt umber), and the green is shell malachite.

You'll note that so far I've avoided using red, blue, or green (not counting the malachite). That's because those are considered the three primary colors of the medieval color scheme, and they will make up the bulk of the decoration. I've got vines that will be nothing but red and blue with white highlights, for example, and allllll that diapering in the background of the miniatures will be red, blue, and green in a specific pattern. Basically, doing those colors requires more focus than I really wanted to dedicate today, so once the people were painted, I stopped.

Feel free to ask me questions in the comments section of this blog, or on Facebook where I'm sharing these posts. A couple of days ago I was forced to drastically shorten my post on gilding, and I left out a lot of the details and steps involved in the work. Today I'm not blogging from my phone, so I can be more verbose.

If you're a scribe yourself, I'd love to hear from you! What's your least favorite part of the process? Why is that?

Cheers, and I'll see you tomorrow.

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