Dark Age: Painting St. Isaac Part 1

Today I’ll go over painting Isaac from the Dark Age Path to Glory starter.

Here he is all primed. You can still see some of the orange showing through. The chipped primer is actually where I removed some mold lines I didn’t notice before spraying.

I’m starting off with some NMM steel. I add a repeating light/dark/light/dark gradient to his gun. I start with two light streaks of Menoth White Highlight, blending them outward into Underbelly Blue, then into a warm toned black (Thamar Black mixed with a little Red Ink and Bloodstone).

Here’s a gradient swatch I made in photoshop to show, on a larger scale, just how much those alternating bands of light to dark can make your brain think you’re seeing something metallic.

Now I’m turning him around to work on the back – where most of these metallic parts are found.

Another photoshop swatch. I’m painting a similar gradient on to his back. There’s something about a dark to light gradient – especially with a strong line of highlight across the top – that seems to convey metallic.

I’m finishing up his back by lining all the recesses with the warm toned black, and adding highlight lines along all the flat edges. I’ve also done some more work to his legs, working on the cylindrical shapes down there.

So here’s a cylindrical gradient. A strong highlight down the middle that blends into darker bands should give the feel of a rounded metallic object. A lighter line along the bottom can be used to represent reflected light: the light of the ground shining up onto the metal surface.

 

For the disc in the center of his back I went with a shape like this.

On the back I’m starting on the cable tubing. I’m going with a copper palette to add some nice contrast to the surrounding colors. I’m still trying to nail down the perfect copper palette. I usually use Bloodstone, highlighted with Menoth White Highlight and shaded with Coal Black. This time I added some Sanguine Base to the Bloodstone to try to make it a bit redder.

Wire is basically just a curvy Cylinder, so the gradient used here is similar to the cylindrical one. You want to make the highlights even stronger wherever it bends though. Unfortunately this looks a bit more like maple syrup than wire. Hey I said copper was tricky didn’t I?

In this last step I’ve cleaned up the wire and some of the other metallic areas a bit. Next time we will start on his green armor.

~Hope you enjoyed the article! Did you find the swatches helpful?

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