Welcome to part two of my Overwatch Soldier:76 Work-in-Progress blog! Be sure to check out part one if you missed it. :)
A close-in detail of the glove.
Above you can see a close-in detail shot of one of the gloves. Red is one of my favorite colors to paint! After all this was done, though, it was time to finally figure out what the heck I was doing with the rest of the jacket leather. I went looking for reference photos.
It’s always best, when you’re trying to duplicate something from real life, to find photo references. I’m always amazed when I see people try to do something like paint an animal without looking for a good reference photo.
In this case, what I was looking for were photos that would help me understand the pattern of the particular leather I wanted, so that I could try to duplicate the visual effect. Here are a couple of the photos that helped me:
This one was useful for studying the seams.
This one really helped me understand how to break down the pattern, and it was even a jacket, so it was a perfect reference. :)
Once I had those references, I tried a couple of different ways to do the leather. I liked the effect I was getting on the cuffs so I decided to go with that for the rest of the dark grey leather, and also on the red and white leather. I wanted them to look like a different type or softer finish.
Below you can see the various stages of the grey. You can see on the bottom where I’ve blocked out larger sections with implied creases in the leather. I did try to make many of the creases follow where they would naturally appear with wear, but a lot of creases in leather come from the original animal’s structure, so many don’t align that way. The middle section I’ve painstakingly mapped in the detail. Yes, each of those little irregular dots is hand-painted. Don’t even ask how long it took me! The darker top part, with softer detail, has received a glaze of Reaper MSP Brown Liner. This is a translucent, near-black paint that’s good for darkening and shading with glazes and washes.
I suppose this is where I give a shout-out to the brush that got me through all this. It survived all of the leather and then took another four months of painting before it finally died in glorious combat with some extreme freehand (maybe I’ll post about that project in the future!). The brush I use for all of my high-end painting is a Kolinsky sable brush (Kolinsky is the highest grade of sable). I use the DaVinci Maestro brand, Series 10, size 1. This is a longer, tapering round with a razor-sharp tip. Though it’s a size 1, it’s smaller around than many brushes of that size, and I can do anything with it, even the tiniest eyeballs. Even with the abuse I heap on it, one of these will last me easily nine to twelve months of painting 10 to 20 hours a week and it’ll never lose that wonderful sharp point. So if you don’t paint as much as I do, think about how long it will last you! $16 might seem a lot for a brush, but when it lasts you that long, and performs that well, for me it’s worth it. :)
Starting on the back.
Above, you can see the start of the back leather on the coat. The red and yellow panels were mostly too thin to try to do the larger texture I used on the blue, so I stuck to the very small dots for those. I did go with the larger pattern on the red part of the “76”, though, because I wanted it to really stand out. :)
Here below I started to map out the blue and you can see the various stages this particular texture goes through. Instead of just filling space with irregular dots, I’m mapping out a pattern (it’s kind of like drawing endless drunken spiderwebs, really), and then highlighting within each section of that. I ended up really enjoying this texture and will absolutely use it on a Patreon video project in the future to show you guys how I do it in real-time!
Mapping out the blue, all stages visible.
So again in the bottom section you see I’m starting by delineating larger sections between creases, then taking each of those sections and doing another grid (more drunken spiderwebs!) and then highlighting each little bit, at least a couple of highlights, and then highlights for each of the larger sections to make it all look three-dimensional. My shadows overall I ended up keeping very subtle, just glazing in sections with Brown Liner. The reason for this is that on a larger sculpture like this, the model will cast its own natural shadows. This means if you try to make very dark shadows, as you would on a small 28mm miniature, they’ll look unnatural or wrong, or like you’re trying to depict very harsh lighting.
This is actually true not for just huge statues but for any miniature that’s large, starting around 72mm scale. So when you’re working big, try going for more subtle shadows and see if you like the effect. And hey, it saves you work, too!
Blue sleeve, complete! Whew. That was a LOT of work, but I saved the jacket for last because I was really excited to work on it, so I really didn’t mind. :)
Here’s the start on mapping in the red on the 76. The red strips along the side were too small to go with the spiderwebs effect, but the numbers were big enough and I was really happy with the effect!
So above, you can see the red being mapped in just like I did with the blue. I went back and forth on the red highlights. At first I thought I would use orange and yellow, because I’ve always kind of not liked highlighting red with pink. But when I tried the orange, I realized I wasn’t a fan. It was too close to the yellow, and wasn’t a strong enough highlight to really make the leather pop. I realized that if I highlighted with pink, but then put a glaze (kind of like a really weak wash) of bright red over the top, it would knock down the pink effect and also blend in my highlights. So I tried that, and it worked! My glaze color was Reaper MSP 9094 Clear Red. The Clear MSP colors are really good for this sort of thing—for glazing to make a color brighter or more vibrant or to make blends and highlights look smoother. Here’s another shot of the jacket back, almost done.
Jacket leather, almost done!
At this point I was so close I could taste it—and also, I was almost at my deadline! I wanted to enter Soldier into the ReaperCon Master Series Open painting competition. I managed to make it, BARELY, an hour before the deadline, after getting up early to work on him every day of the Con leading up to Saturday’s deadline!
Soldier scored a Gold medal, my first at ReaperCon. Previously I hadn’t felt inspired to really give an entry everything I had, and I also work for Reaper so I wasn’t sure I should enter. But I was so excited about Soldier, and I’d worked so long on him (two years!) and I loved how he came out. I had to enter him, and I’m so glad that I did. You can see his finished photos on the front gallery page of my site here. :)
So after all that, you’d think I’d be done with painting gigantic Overwatch statues wouldn’t you? Any sane person would be…
Yeah. Well. Tracer statue repaint, coming soon to a Twitch channel near you. Watch this space, I’ll post about it when I start up the Tracer on Twitch. :)
(I told myself I couldn’t buy the Hanzo till I painted Tracer…a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do!)
I hope you enjoyed this work-in-progress blog! Stay tuned for a new entry featuring WIP photos of the GW Forge World Leman Russ I recently completed. And remember, I have a brand new Patreon where I’m going to be sharing written and video tutorials on a bunch of new projects, and it’s FREE for the month of January! You won’t be charged till February 1st. You can find it here: the PaintingBig Patreon!