‘The Sentry’ tutorial: how I painted the box art for Galahad Miniatures

I want to present to you my first collaboration with Galahad Miniatures, a cyclops bust modeled by Raúl García Latorre. This bust is also a piece sculpted digitally so it requires a series especial considerations. Textures, especially in the skin, are very subtle, so we will have to be very careful to respect the original sculpture.

The colour scheme that I picked for this piece is quite conventional, a complementary game of red-green where the armour in red will work as a frame for the light green tones in the skin.

As I normally do, I sprayed the figure with black primer and sketched highlights with airbrush to brighten up light areas. In this case the idea is not so much trying to pose light areas according to a zenital light source, but rather to increase the brightness in the areas that we think will receive more light. We want to be able to cover those areas better with out paint. We will require more layers painting over black than over white (or grey). Black spray primer is a painting base that provides good adherence on the resin and makes painting on top of it easier.

Now we basecoat the skin in a greenish tone. Generally I like to use transparencies in this first phase. Overlapping layers of green will help the tone to be more uniform.

At this point we outline the tonal scheme. In the skin I wanted to emphasize the lips attracting attention to this point, and apply some fleshy tones on them. About the skin in general, I planned the variations of green by playing with oranges and cold blues. The methodology I normally work with is always the same: sketch, clean.

As you can see, between the last picture and this one, even though the tones I was looking for were more or less there, I had to correct the size of the light planes. This also means more cleaning, it’s not a single direction process from shadow to light, it’s a balance exercise.

In this last step, I added reds and magentas to the shadow areas, especially in the lips, and I sketched details such as teeth, lips and scars that help define the overall look.

In the next photos, colour differs quite a lot because of the camera, but you can distinguish how we are not simply playing with a tone of green, but instead applying different variations of skin tones, apart from adding oranges and browns (Model Air and Citadel Inks) for the mid tone. We add variations in reds and saumons so that the skin develops a tonal variety that enrichens the texture.

In this last picture we see a big different in the light areas of the bust skin. To increase contrast I added light skin (Vallejo), turquoise (Golden), a mixture that results in a cold light which is ideal to make it stand out from the rest without losing the tone.

Also, with a yellowish skin tone I drew the pimples in the skin to complete the texture work.
In order to contrast the skin with the armour I used a reddish copper tone, that complements and also frames the light green tone.
The armour basetone is a red-black to which I added saumon pink from Vallejo. The trick here is not to lose intensity in the mid and shadow tones. For this step it is very useful to have different images of reference materials.

Afterwards I outlined the shadows in the armour with a mixture of red and black ink, and I used a mixture of red and walnut inks for the tones (and the satin finish) in the shadow areas of the armour.

In the next picture you can see a cleaner and better defined armour. Normally I blend using transparencies, but I also use stippling a lot. In this case I blend with a light tone. This is done by dragging a thin layer of preferrably light tone from the light mid tone to the highest light. This is a thick glaze in which it is very important that we unload the brush accordingly and the brushstroke is precise and heavily oriented.

When it comes to degrading in tone, we do so by dragging with the flat part of the brush from the mid light areas to the shadow. The orientation of the brushstroke is essential if we want to avoid paint stains.

We add titanium white to the saumon pink and we mark the maximum lights that we will balance afterwards with a red glaze and a bit of chestnut ink for intensity.

If we look for consistency in those highlights, we have to make sure paint is very thick so we achieve all of its potential. In these last photographs, in the back part we can see a sketch of the process that is much more radical. As you can see, we would add intermediate tones to the ones we already see represented there to soften the transitions.

I hope you liked it, and as usual, if you want to follow more of my work don’t hesitate to visit me on facebook, Marc Masclans Miniatures. Greetings, and enjoy painting!