Chest of Colors forum

found on CMON forum:

Razza wrote:Hi all, here is the tutorial I promised for sigvalds gold nmm armour-

1. I started with a basecoat of calthan brown + snakebite leather + foundry canvas mix. I used calthan brown to give a quick even basecoat cutting down on the paint layers and keeping it smooth. The foundry canvas was added to give the colour a yellow tint.
2. I then added more canvas to the above mix for the highlights. At this stage I started thinking about how the light was going to work on the armour and placed my highlights loosely based on that.
3. Bleached bone was then added to this mix, once again thinking about how the light was going to react on the armour.
4. Even more bleached bone was added to the mix for further highlights.
5. I then started shading the armour with a mix of snakebite leather and terracotta. This mix was kept very thin.
6. I then used pure terracotta to shade the armour. I was aware of the nmm needing contrast so I placed the shading on the surface areas also.
7. Terracotta + black mix was then used to give more contast.
8. The armour was then highlighted with bleached bone.
9. I then shaded the armour with a mix of chaos black and badab black.
   Before the final stage I washed a mix of yellow ink and glaze medium over the armour. I then added a little red into this glaze and placed it in the deeper areas on the armour. Some purple ink was also added into the darkest areas. The glaze pulls all the highlight and shade stages together and strengthens the colours.
10. As you can see from the pictures the final stage of nmm is the most important, adding the white highlight gives the illusion of a reflective surface. The white also pushes the contrast in the nmm which is very important, painting metal effect needs contrast and a range from black to white helps the finish. The hot spots don’t always work in nmm but with this example I think it does as sigvald is going to keep his armour nice and clean the hot spots help that effect.

Click to see full-sized image

Sorry for the crappy pics (I did them on my quality phone) but I hope you can see the general idea of what I was doing.
Cheers all, I will be happy to answer any more questions.

Daz

uhmm...
very nice, but it looks like there's suddenly a different paintjob on pic no. 10...I'm not saying it actually is!
steps 1-9 are small steps, I can see the progress, what has changed... and then he hits me with no. 10. Are these white highlights makins such a difference or is something more? Lighting maybe - background colour and paintjob differ slightly on that last pic.

This is just stunning!

And yeah, I would tend to think like Phil that there are a few more steps between 9 and 10 cause it's just getting there from nearly nowhere, but besides that, again, this is simply a breathtaking achievment

or maybe those last strokes with white paint make such difference

wouldn't call it a different paintjob, probably what Hellspawn said - some more photos would be useful.

did you read the description, guys, or only viewed the picture? the text say that the 10th step (final photo) is crucial as it makes all the difference. unfortunately it isn't broken into several more sub-steps, which would make the tutorial much clearer.
but you may imagine how much distracting it is to take many in progress photos often...

I saw this model at one GD and it actually looks that good, so no PSing was necessary.

I did read the whole article watching carefully the pics while reading the understand the mechanics and try to noticed the colors blending, but yeah, some more in between pics for step 9 to 10 would be uber awsome ^^

yeah like 9.25 9.5 9.75
I think we're most interested in those steps. Much more than the steps 1-9, which are pretty easy to imagine.

mahon wrote:yeah like 9.25 9.5 9.75
I think we're most interested in those steps. Much more than the steps 1-9, which are pretty easy to imagine.

Yeah, exactly

I tried it out and something magical happened between step 9-10 for me too, just not the same as on those pics!

Seriously though, I read it years ago but still very good except for the part Phil mentioned!