Sunday, November 8, 2009

(PM01) Romans - Part 2



Step Six. The eyes. I paint both the whites and a small black dot on the eyes. I've always done that since my first figures, and after 20 years or so, I've got a decent speed at it.

Sometimes I will need to go back and repaint an eye or two. To do that, I will usually just cover the messed up eye with dark-ish brown, then repaint the white and black. That didn't happen at all this time.

I frequently use some pretty beat-up brushes, but I have set aside a detail brush for very fine work, almost all of that is painting eyes.

A couple of tips...

1. Practice. Like I said, I've been doing it for a long time on a lot of figures. I've painted a lot of very bad eyes.

2. Thin your paints. It will help control where the paint goes, and it will keep the eye area from getting globbed up with paint.

3. Keep in mind the natural movements of the eye on real people. If you screw up and paint the black dot to one side, make the other one fit that gesture. This means that sometimes figures won't be looking straight ahead. In fact, sometimes I don't want them looking straight ahead. But having one guy in a unit of 18 glancing at the man to his left doesn't seem so odd and is better than obsessing over detail that most people won't even notice.

I spent about half the time on the white, half the time on the black dots. Because of the speed I can do this at, it's sometimes the sort of thing I will do while waiting for something else that's going on, like water boiling for dinner, etc. (That's what I did tonight.)

When it's sometimes hard to get enough time to paint, you can find small breaks in your daily schedule now and then to make small progress.


Step Six: 5 min.
Total: 83 min.

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