Painting a commission Titan

The first sizable commission this year, this storm giant/ancient greek god/titan looked like a fun project from the start. Let's see what Contrast paints are capable of at this scale.

Painting

Prime Munitorum Varnish, then Wraithbone. Lay on the Contrast basecoats.

Just after a couple of basecoats, it's clear (if it wasn't before) that large round shapes are Contrast paints' weak point. Whereas on smaller/denser details, such as any of the ones below, they look great.

I started with the metallics, in case I needed to do clean-up, then followed up with the base to do any drybrushing early. Anything else in between. Finish with the skin, in case of any retouching.

Traditional metallic clasps, chains, armor pieces

Dark gold larger armor pieces and stuff

Rugged wasteland base

Painting marble

Light leather (Contrast)

Cold white (hair) with Soulblight Grey

Warm white cloth

Dark wood on a little chest fastened to his belt

Blond hair (simple) on the ropes

Painting eyes

The initial plan was to paint Light skintone (Contrast) but as the basecoat looked like crap, I did a cleanup/layer with Heavy Skintone. It still looked like crap.

I washed over with Reikland Fleshshade, which kind of fixed the skin by blending the various areas. I continued to highlight as per medium skintone, but the end result was still off, due to the large areas of skin (even though I tried some feathering on the larger muscles, as well as glazed into the deepest recesses to lighten up the heavy contrast pooling).

A final glaze of 2:1 diluted Guilliman Flesh blended in the highlights pretty well.

As a quick break from all the high stakes skin painting, I did the pattern on his belt using Talassar Blue.

Here's a closeup of the face (from before the glaze).

Time to experiment a bit, here at the end. I wanted a pale yellow lightning bolt with no hint of orange (a la Zeus' lightning bolt in the Thor movie). I opted for Lamenter's Yellow on a white undercoat, which also gave some free OSL type effect on the hand as I slopped over.

Highlight Fluorescent Yellow.

Superhighlight Dead White.

Start out the sword as silver.

Paint the hilt Snakebite Leather. Then paint streaks of diluted (1:2) Frostheart on large portions of the blade. I opted for this more restrained power blade effect as the sword is not currently wielded.

Paint several more layers, each smaller than the last.

Spray varnish, then apply gloss varnish by hand on the lightning bolt and the sword blade.

Finished!