On The Desk - Mean and Green Part 2 - Cloak and Horns

 This week we're going to be looking at the cloak. To start with I want to look at an early photo of the miniature so we can see how the zenithal prime gave us quite a nice contrast on the cloak. I decided to use white and black and various shades in between to tidy this up and then apply the colour after.

And here is the cloak after I tidied up the black/white. You might ask why I'm using this technique rather than just painting purple, then shading and highlighting as normal? Well, I hadn't tried it before and wanted to give it a go. Best way to improve is to get yourself out of your comfort zone and widen your skills.

I then thinned down some Naggaroth Night to glaze consistency and used several layers (letting each fully dry, I used a hairdryer to speed things up) to add the colour.

This left me with a nice transition but I decided I wanted to go a little lighter so I glazed some purple mixed with a little white into the highest parts.

For the back of the cloak I wanted it black so I again used black and white to work on the contrast of the folds. Here we can see I've made the highlights far too strong so it doesn't look right but I'll fix that in a bit.

Next up I decided to work on the bone horns. I used P3 Menoth White base and highlight along with some Vallejo Tank Brown to create the transition from dark to light, then adding in black for the very tips.

The fur cloak on his shoulders was done with similar colours, I used some brown and black washes and just played around until I got the look I wanted. You can also see at this point how I toned down the highlights on the cloak using mid tone glazes, it looks far more believable now.

Coming along nicely, I'm really happy with the colours I have so far. As always post any constructive criticism or questions in the comments below!