Ripperdactyls – Shading

Started with Secret Weapon Flesh Wash. I mixed this 1:1 with water. In the end, it went all over every part of the rippers, but it wasn’t slapped on randomly. I worked to pull the paint from the highlighted areas to the shaded areas. The hope is that when it dries this way, that there will be a semi-translucent gradient from highlight to shade. It won’t work out this way, and will require specific work to highlight, and then specific work to “mid tone”, but it’s a good start.

This dried slightly glossy (ugh) and occasionally in a little to much of a strong edge, where I wanted a smooth gradient.

Then I mixed the SW Flesh Wash with Snakebite Leather to make a slightly less translucent paint and again went over the parts with those strong edges to smooth them out, and to darken more.

(also did just a simple black wash:water 1:1 over the skinks, because it’s really messy and is part of the “simple” method of painting my skinks. Wasn’t going to highlight-up-glaze-down on them.)

The spots are Snakebite Leather, with less water than the glazes to make it slightly more opaque. Then I mixed that with Rhinox Hide to get an middle layer, then just Rhinox Hide. Still trying to paint the middle of each spot/layer so that it looks a little more blended than just “brown on orange”. I was trying to emulate this photo a bit, but I’m happy that the wings are a lot darker than that reference image.

I still have a little bit of shading to do on the undersides of them.

Next I’m going to do some highlighting – raise up the body/limbs a bit in tone, and the edges of the wings. Once that’s all done, it’s onto the skinks (who should be relatively easy compared to painting 24 of them…).

I’ve got one more painting project to get started on before OFCC, but I think that at worst he’ll just get a basecoat and then hidden in the ranks somewhere…>.>