My latest Freehand: Lady Justice

For a while now I have been working on my Custodes army.  The tanks have by far taken the longest to do (one because they are big and two, because I need inspiration to do them)




When I am painting freehand I need some kind of inspiration to really do a good job, painting freehand (or anything for that matter) on a super time crunch sucks for me.  Don't get me wrong, I paint fast...but only when I'm inspired.


Well, let's meet my latest inspiration: Lady Justice.
 This painting was done by Raphael and is very subtle in it's use of colors.













The picture was too tall to use on the side of a razorback so I cropped it to just focus on the arm and weights (This also had the added benefit of not making me paint a face, lol).

The picture at the right is an example of the first stage of any freehand project I do.  I took the shape of the area on my razorback and drew it out on a piece of paper.  I then used my iPad and with the actual image above I zoomed (cropped) into the area that I wanted to see.  This allowed me to see the subtleties of the arm and the folds of the clothing better.  I then used that image on the iPad to draw out on my piece of paper like so.

Next I started with the background and shaping.  This picture has a deep blue background.  The choice for this was pretty obvious: Asurmen blue wash.  I did one layer on the 'less blue,' areas and then did 2-3 more layers on the 'more blue,' areas.  Obviously the Master's painting (raphael) is a more subtle background (and all colors) than mine but I didn't have months to get the stuff 100% perfect.

I then went on to shaping/outlining.  As I have said before (BOLS article) this stage is perhaps the most important, it is also the least rewarding and hard.  This time it was particularly annoying because the pencil didn't want to write on the wash (my asurmen blue wash was really old).  So, I had to get out bleached bone and dry brush the area where the pencil would go.  Once I did that the pencil worked like it normally should






After all the painting/ Shading/ Highlighting I finally came out with the finished project.  I am going to do a tutorial on how to do these effects later so I will spare you the details, suffice it to say I am done with half my tanks and this army is getting very very close to done!!!

Thoughts/ Comments/ Hate?

~DUKE