Step by Step: Dino, the lone wolf

Aloa ladies and gentlemen,

Important Information for the next two weeks on MV:
Roman will be offline for the next two weeks, starting next week Monday after
the upcoming review of MV Jar's Advanced Class.

Roman is doing final preparations for his upcoming MV's Jar's Beginners Class in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is travelling and when he comes back he takes a rest and is up to a private coaching session with his dad about color theory, painting with oil colors on canvas. So, nothing from Roman's side, but be sure to see the jungle bounce from the other monkeys.

Now, time for the results of the latest tutorial voting.
MV's year of the painter 2 is proud to present to you the next article in line.
If you want to keep track with an overview on what has happened so far 
please check this link!

Many thanks to everyone who voted since last Tuesday. It was a close call between "Azog" and "Dino". We had some 23 votes overall. We had 12 votes for "Dino" and 11 for "Azog".
The winner is:

 

Support Massive Voodoo!
If you like to support the monkeys of Massive Voodoo in what they do, please feel invited to drop a jungle donation in their direction via paypal or check their miniatures they got on sale.

Roman is now taking over with the article - we hope you enjoy it!

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FOREWORD
This is Radwulf, the lone wolf. A great miniature sculpted by Raul Garcia Latorre for his company Mproyec. Sadly Radwulf was limited and is already sold out. I named my version "Dino" and in this article you learn why ...

A little story I put behind my version:

"Dino travels alone. He is fine being alone. He used to have friends on his journeys, but "Tilda" and "Grumgi" have been eaten by Trolls, his love "Magdar" died in the desert. Burnag, his best buddy just fell of a cliff and even Radwulf's dog "Willy" got poisened by a scorpion's sting and died awful. That is why Dino learned to travel alone as he do not want to have what is left of his heart break again. A heart can only break a couple of times." 

Frankly,
I can tell I do like to paint Raul's sculpts very much. Not only that Raul is a great personality, he is a master in what he creates and the volumes he forms are a joy to tickle with a brush. When I first saw the sculpt of this dwarf I knew I want to paint him. And I had to be fast as nowadays with so many limited miniatures they can run out fast. I am still not sure if I think this is a good or bad thing. What do you think?

This article differs in the quality of photos, some were done with the big studio camera, others were done with my digital camera and some were done with just my mobile camera. Such an article needs many photos to be sorted out in the end and I was happy to see that I was able to tell everything I wanted to tell with the photos I have made.


PAINTING THE DWARF - 
NON METALLIC METAL, SKINTONE, OVERALL HARMONY

Allright. Let's dive right in. I went for using the base the model arrives without further ado, but wanted to have it on a round plinth, which actually fits well beneath it. I prepared the model like this for painting:

Decided to paint the arms beside the model - at least for the beginning steps - as without this I would not be able to reach the model like I want to due to his pose.

This looked like the evil cork monster and I had to laugh pretty hard on it:

The dwarf and the seperate arms got primed black without further ado on top. Why I miss out on the bright tone on top of this one? Well, I can not really explain, I just wasn't in the mood and I wanted to paint on black.Using GW black primer here. Pft! Pft!

Diving right into my color scheme for this model and already encountering my issue with only black primer: The colors do not cover as good as on a mixture of primers or grey primer. It's just too dark somehow, but well, I will not get stopped by this as I decided to do so and in the end I need just more layers of color on top of the others.

I went in there really sketchy, just to get a feeling for it. Skin! Plow! Basecolor! Plow! Fur! Plow!

While I went further into the model I put more and more layers on skin (where you already can see the fun I aiming at when it comes to different skintone tonalities, sketching), painted the beard in a basic colorouish orange brown and decided - which is very uncommon for me, to paint Non Metallic Metal, NMM.

Well I usually never do NMM. 
Why? Mmh, personal taste tells me that I often do not like the result, it quickly can look like stone if the principals of metal reflections is done without proper studying. I know that I can paint a decent enough True Metallic Metal and from teaching many classes I know that I know what I am saying, when I explain TMMs. I studied it with practical exercise long enough now. So why not give it a try with NMM. My version of it. I was not aiming to copy another artist's style or had something else as a goal. I just wanted to do it, my way.

THOUGHTS ON THE NMM
Again I went in rather sketchy on the NMM. I knew I will have strong edge highlights on the metals as metals are a material that reflect light influance much more intense. I did not go with pure white, but with a much brighter tone I used as the base color.

Actually, if you look on the big photo above, you can see that even the basecolor is weird. It's not a color you can find in a recipe like, use this grey to start your NMM or such. The colors I found there were mainly based on my color choices of the base I already sketched. Metals reflect, not only light, but also their surroundings. So I used a drop of this greenish/tourquoise/blue/grey I used on the base also in my sketch of the NMM. Mainly on areas that were aiming to the ground.  So far for the sketch, I was really nervous now ... and needed to paint something else on the model instead:

I sketched a little more on the face, shadows, rough highlights, color variations, just painting. Plow!

While I did I always had to look back to my NMM sketch. What the heck am I doing here? Look at it, Roman, trust yourself, paint on until you will see what you are searching for. Well, I did love the beard color in this stage, it gave the face a natural frame as it was much darker from the basic tone than the skintone. Damn I didn't sketch his left leg at all in NMM :D

This NMM looks interesting over here. I really enjoyed the sketch, but also was thinking often about what I was missing. I couldn't name it in the beginning, but quickly I decided to stop thinking to much about it and just to add more contrast.

Sharper highlights, plow, plow, more diversity in the surfaces, shadows here and there for more definition. I also used the airbrush to spray a glaze of my tourquise/blueish/something green over the groundword and metals to pull it all together a little more:

Still did not touch his left leg, haha. Well, I decided to check back with my range of contrast in the figure by doing a black and white photo. Of course the reflections in the metal did not look 'perfect' everywhere, but I put that thought far away as I just wanted to enjoy. Left leg!!!

While other projects rose from nowhere around the dwarf I enjoyed being distracted for a while. Well, I am not really distracted when working on several models. It just calms my thoughts on one particular thing and it helps to get back to it later on with a much clearer focus. Sometimes I do enjoy using a color I use in project a) on project b) and so on, this gives a wide variety of colors appearing while painting. I love it.

So while painting elsewhere I only painted his beard more sandish. Still left leg!

When I came back to the dwarf I decided he looks stupid without arms and weaponry. Painted the arms and weapns in the sketchy way I did the other parts earlier and put them to the model. Now I liked that. I loved how the wristlet on his left arm turned out and somehow - by magic - I was able to start with his left leg. Plow!

It is very important to look at the model from different angles while you paint. From the top, from below, from its back and so on, just to a) see if a volume you have set into a light situation works from a different angle too and b) if you forgot an area or spot.

While I was painting up a Zombie for the big MV Zombieproject (btw Update #02 coming soon) I had some Magenta on my brush and was in the mood to add stronger color variations to the skintone too.

It slowly began to move away from the sketchy work to more detail work. Making transitions smoother were I wanted them smoother, increasing highlights here and there, rebuilding colors I lost for example in the skintone variations: He recieved red hands, now I bring back skintone on them again with the use of glazes.


 I painted the beard whitish. He was to become an old dwarf, but hey this guy reminds me of someone ... and that is why I tattooed him like I did.

Dino, the italian master of plinth art - in the version of my figure a little younger, but already with the same unbreakable handshake of destruction.
 

True? For me yes.

 Allright, then. Main final works have been cleaning up areas, smoothing rough transitions in skin and NMM by using glazes of the color that reasoned the unsmooth transition.

 Left leg! Hah!

Well, I did this quite the while, but I realized that I did not want to get too smooth in the NMM. I liked the rough way I did it and I learned a lot while doing so. I kept some brushstrokes for the good memory :)

For finalisation I decided to put thin glazes of yellow on top of the model as I had the feeling my highlights went too withish. I did not do so in the NMM as I wanted to have them as powerful as possible. I even went in there with some white dots to mark reflections. My way of NMM I guess :D



AFTERMATH
I really enjoyed to paint this wonderful sculpt. I hope you enjoyed the walkthrough with me and my thoughts. If you want to see more photos of the finished model please check Putty&Paint.

The miniature was sold to a private collector!
Thank you for your support in my passion, work and art!

Keep on happy painting!
Best Wishes,
Roman