For the past couple months I've been working on my entries for the Crystal Brush painting competition (coming up at Adepticon next month). There have of course been other projects, but now that it's getting close I'm putting all other projects off to the side. I've gotta finish my entries before it's too late. Here is a sneak peak at one of the four figures I'm hoping to enter, a 54mm Knight of the Holy Sepulchre.
This has been a long term project of mine. I actually started it over a year ago. It's a complicated figure and the paint scheme I went with was a tough one (lots of black, white, and design work). So when I ran into trouble, something I was trying didn't work out as well as I'd like, I'd just set the figure aside for a few months and come back to it later with a fresh perspective. It's not quite finished, but he's close. Here's a look at how it progressed...
The early focus was the rider. I left the cape off so I could paint his back and details along his left side.
The banner was an interesting project. I wanted to stick with a more or less historical paint scheme, so the design had to be the order's cross pattern on a white background. But that left a lot of empty space. So to keep it from being boring, I put in a subtle white on white pattern.
With the body mostly finished, I attached the rest of his cape. The figure has a lot of white, which is a tough color to work with. To do the shadows I used brownish off whites instead of grey. He's wearing natural material, so it makes sense that you wouldn't get these perfectly neutral grey shadows. The next step was to tackle the horse. To contrast with the white, I wanted to do a black horse. This gave me a lot of trouble and I ended up setting the knight aside for about half a year before feeling confident enough to try again.
When I finally felt ready, I went with a blue-black for the horses coat. Like with the white, I'm avoiding grey is I can. Instead I go from black, to a deep blue, and then start to mix in a light skin tone to create the highlights. You'll notice I also began to add a border design to the knight's cape. Just like with the flag, there's a lot of white space and I wanted to do something to make it a little more interesting. I figure a simple border design could still be historically accurate (or at least historically plausible).
I continued to do more of the horses coat and then turned to the equipment. I decided to use the same red-purple as the design on the banner to help tie things together. I also really liked how that color looked next to the blue-black of the horse.
With the horse close to being finished, I finally glued down the knight (he'd just been resting on there for the photos) and then attached his shield. As with the banner, I painted on the cross pattern freehand.
And here's a quick look at the other side of the figure where you can see the knight's armor. In the image at the very top of this post you can see that I've also finished up the border pattern of the cape, continuing it up along the side and on the front. There's still plenty to do (horse's tail, hooves, eyes, and reins, the reverse side of the banner, the base, and then weathering), but I'm hopeful this project will be wrapped up by the end of the month.
If you're curious to see more detail on how I did this figure, just ask or check out my painting site (link below). I will also post additional images as I take care of the finished touches on this piece.
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