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| Not afraid to get that cape dirty. |
It's been a few weeks since the last post, but I've not actually been idle - just haven't had time to take photos. One of the more recent tests has been the cape for the Praetor. I considered for a long while of how I wanted to show this, if it should be white, cream, or some other colour. Ultimately I wanted white to show purity and to help frame an otherwise darker model while still providing something to harmonise the brighter values of red on top and serve as a visual line to draw the eye upwards.
So the cape would be white, but white itself is never pure. There needs to be shadows, highlights, reflections from other colours, and so on. I ended up going for blue tints to continue the purity and angelic theme. Cream or beige is often associated with coarser material suitable for more rigorous endeavours, where as the blue is finery and status for the administrative halls of Terra. A high ranking Blood Angel seems to fit with status, purity, and the ornate armour already suggests artisan finery.
So far at least, the cape is just the basic outline and was entirely done with an airbrush. A few edge highlights will likely be added in, and then there's patterning to be added as well to break up the large surface (I'm thinking bright gold trim). I've struggled with capes in the past when using a brush, so this was mostly an attempt to gain experience with an airbrush to see what I could do.
The initial base colour is Night Lords Blue. This gives the deeper shadow colours, but it's not really too visible at the end - it will be entirely covered by the end, but covered with translucent layers. Next I mixed in Chemos Purple and used that to highlight some of the inner cape areas to act as a kind of reflection from the red armour. The end effect is subtle, but it's there.
Moving onwards through the paints I generally just remixed into an emptied but not thoroughly cleaned airbrush cup. The idea is to subtly influence each layer and help it blend into the one before - not sure it works too much, but it saves on having to deep clean between switching out paints. The next step up in blue was Macragge Blue, followed by Calgar Blue. These I started to add as highlights, but painting in thin layers and allowing them to over-spray into the folds.
One of the keys to cloth is that it's less about highlights and more about shadows: the mid-tones are the most important, deeper shadows away from the angle of the light source (_not_ just recessed areas, which might actually get direct light) and very soft highlights. The airbrush helps here: just angle the model and hit the sides or "walls" of the folds from one direction, adjusting the angle to reach recessed areas too as necessary.
Next up was White Scar, which was mixed with Calgar Blue in different ratios for multiple passes. Keep it thinned to almost glaze consistency here, and focus on raised areas the most. This was generally a filter to whiten the cape more than anything else.
After all of that I noticed some of the shading had been lost and so I went back with incredibly thinned Macragge Blue and deepened them again. I didn't want to go too much darker, again just filtering the colour is enough as that will naturally darken compared to white anyway. If I were to do this more then I would need to start adjusting air pressure, but as it was I played with trigger control and distance from the model for more or less the same effect (kind of, not really).
As always, the airbrush works best if the paints are thinned. Do not use them straight out of the bottle (at least not Citadel paints). Work in multiple layers, change colours gradually instead of going for large value jumps, and the end result can be very smooth without any speckling or "noise".
The cape is currently a little too contrasting to the rest of the model, however this will be sorted once edge highlights are applied on the armour (including the gold) and other details are added to the cape.
-- silly painter.
