On The Desk - The Nurse Part 2

Forwards with The Nurse! As I mentioned at the end of the last article I started sketching in some colours on the coat, here is a photo of where I started:

I used VMC Field Blue with a little black to darken it down as a base. I then darkened the mix again and worked it into the folds of the coat.

For the lights of the coat I decided to use the loaded brush technique made popular by Ben Komets of Painting Buddha (they release excellent painting tutorials that I hope to review at some point but go check them out on Youtube) The basic principle behind the loaded brush is to create quick blending transitions that would ordinarily take many layers to achieve. You load the brush with the base colour, add a tip of white on top and then work from the highest light down. As the white runs out you will get a natural blend with the base colour. In practice it's a tricky technique, but the only way to improve is to practice! You can see in the picture below how it's worked for me. I used VMC Ivory for the tip colour.

This was a good start but I wanted to convey a tattered cloth texture to the coat. I used a stippling brush (you can buy these but I just chop down the hairs of an old brush so that only half a cm or so is remaining) to lightly stipple into the highlights using a variety of tones from the base coat up to near ivory. To stipple is similar to dry brushing, load the brush with colour, then wipe the majority off on some tissue paper before lightly touching the flat top of the brush to the surface, don't stab at it otherwise you will leave spidery lines instead of dots.

Next I use glazes to help tie in the stippling in a few areas where it looked a little heavy, base colour glazes helps refocus the highlights. I also used some VMA Armor Brown glazes in the deep folds to add contrast.

At the top of the coat is a crest of feathers. I used a similar colour to the one I used to shade the deep areas of the flesh for the feathers. This reusing colours can help tie a piece together to the eye. The colour is an approximately 60:40 mix of P3 Sanguine Base (quickly becoming one of my favourite colours!) and GW Naggaroth Night. Apologies for the lack of stage photos but I also glazed in some dark tones (just black added to this mix) and a few lights on points (You guessed it, Ivory added to the mix!)

Next up is probably the various leather on the model, there is quite a bit of it from the neck and foot brace to the straps on the coat and mask.