How to Paint Bronze Part 2

Transcript

Welcome to the Hobby Nomicon. Quick one tonight—we’re going to finish up this brass/bronze metal mask. Everything’s dry from yesterday, so we can come back in and wrap it up. Really, we’re just going to do a bunch of different drybrushing.

Pure Silver Highlights

Starting with pure silver, I’m really hitting this raised corner—the brightest part of the model where the light hits it. I’m hitting all the nails on the side, too.

If you look at polished brass once it starts getting hit, beaten, and develops patina, what you actually see is the traditional brass color and then the patina turns almost black. It’s not like a verdigris oxide patina you see on bronze statues—it actually just looks black. Some parts of yesterday’s base coat I intentionally left pure black in those pits, and you can see that as I work through the model.

The Optical Illusion of Layered Drybrushing

Now I’m mixing bright brass into the silver. I’m going to go over all the areas we just did in silver. What this drybrushing does is tint those colors so it creates an optical illusion of being silver. Obviously the pigment is silver, but by going over it with this brass mixture and overlapping into the actual bronze areas, your brain fills in the information and says “that’s bronze.”

When you look at the finished product, there’s black, bronze, silver, and it all comes together looking real. Sometimes when I’m painting, I hit this point where it looks almost too real—not a lot of contrast. For this model, that’s exactly what I’m going for. I want it to look like a real slab of metal on this guy’s face.

Unifying Everything

I hit everything with bright brass by itself, then mixed bright brass with our initial copper base coat. Now I’m going back over the entire mask with this unifying drybrush. This tells your brain “that’s all brass or bronze” even though there are pure silvers in it.

If you look at a forged brass or bronze plate, there IS silver in it. It’s a combination of the patina, the light source, the blacks and darks from patina forming. Zooming in, you can see this thing looks like a hammered brass plate on this dude’s head. It doesn’t look like we painted it.

The Vision for This Model

My goal with this whole model is to have different styles of painting so it looks otherworldly. The helmet doesn’t have the contrast and high values you see from traditional high-end miniature painting—it’s painted very realistically. But the flesh is going to be the opposite. I’m going to do crazy contrast on the flesh with purple shadows, and I can’t decide between human-colored flesh or something Nurgly green. Either way, the flesh will have very high contrast to really contrast with the true metallic metals of the mask.

Quick one to finish this up tonight. See you tomorrow digging into more projects.