Painting Chaosy Green Marble

Transcript

We’re laser engraving to start the day off. I’ve figured out how to engrave dollar store wood and I’m making myself a dice box. One thing I severely underestimated is how much smoke it puts off. The engraving looks great but I nudged the box after focusing the laser, so it’s off-center. Going to drive me crazy.

Planning the Crystal

Today I’m finishing up the Children of Gomb entry—or getting as close as possible. Heavy lifting on the crystal with the marble effect. I wanted to use oils but realized I only have a Zorn palette right now. Had some leakage with my oil paint storage, got frustrated, and chucked the whole set. No blue, no green. So we’re doing this entirely with Scale Color acrylics.

The Palette

Fresh palette: Scale Color pastel green, lime green, alizarin green, Golden high flow translucent gold green for tinting, and Scale Color vanilla white. These Scale Color paints are acrylic but you can use them like oils.

The Dirty Water Trick

The water I’ve been using for this whole project is tinted purple from all the purple pigment. I’m keeping it dirty intentionally—it’ll tint everything slightly purple, lending to a translucent effect or the reflection like we intentionally put purple in the shading on the bottom. Or it could muddy all our colors and look terrible. That’s where we are.

Painting the Marble

Started by deliberately leaving some black undercoat showing through in spots. Mixed up the greens with white and started dabbing it on, then blending with a big makeup brush. The Scale Color paints let you put two colors next to each other and blend them together just like oils.

The key discovery: leaving water droplets on the wet paint creates marble effects naturally—like a tea stain or water stain from a bad wash. Building up swirls and textures this way.

Switched to a proper filbert brush for feathering and blending. The filbert lets you smooth everything out the same way you would with oil paint. Drawing veins very lightly with the end of the paintbrush, then blending them out.

Edge Highlighting

Finished with vanilla white edge highlights on all the edges, then extra-bright stippled highlights on the key edges where the eye goes. These hard edges make it clear we put in the work even if the camera washes out the subtle marble work.

The striations in the actual cast stone look like brush strokes on camera, which is frustrating—they’re part of the rock, not my brushwork. In real life, this thing looks crazy.

Almost Done

The rock itself is done. Still need browns on the back, base texture reapplication in a few spots, and some touchups on the chain. We are in the final stretch. So proud of how this turned out.