A Harlequin's Kiss!

Once again, I was away from home last evening and was so glad I had my portable paint station!  I was in a hurry to get out the door, and so I left several of my paints at home, luckily I did bring enough paint to do the jeweling on this guy as promised! 

In these first pics, I mixed together my "Mephiston Red" and "Macragge Blue" to create purple which I watered down heavily to create a wash and then careful added the wash to the base of all the jeweled stones.  I then went back over and put white on them so that the yellows, oranges, and reds that I use will really stand out.  There has been a lot of discussion by miniature painters regarding black, white, and grey primer or 'undercoating.' For me, white seems to do the trick the best when you want something bright to stand out!

These next three pics show the progression from left to right of the 'jeweling'; what is important here is to decide what direction you want the light to come from as the reflection point on jewels tends to be darkest where your directional light is hitting, and you want the direction to be the same on all of them.  The light tends to 'shine through' the underside opposite of your directional light.  I deferred to the 'upper-right' for my directional lighting: Left) I went over every jeweled piece with a dab of red just up and to the right of center; Middle) I added progressive glazes of red to red-purple, to dark purple; Right) I added glazes of red-orange, orange, orange-yellow and yellow with 'stipled' (brush tip) touches of white for highlighting.

Here is the "before and after" to date, with the recent changes (you can 'click the pic' to enlarge it! :D), I am very pleased with how this guy is turning out! In fact, (painting in a public forum), a passerby happened to notice what I was painting, and happened to be 40K enthusiast!  He happened to have some Harlequins (so he appreciated the work) and happened to have just returned back from Venice on business!  And... he happened to have taken some pictures of Italian Harlequin masques and happened to have them on his phone!  We had a fun talk about painting! 

Well, back to the miniature!  The only thing this Harlequin needs is his Harlequin's kiss, and a really cool base... so, to finish him up tomorrow, I will show you how to do some metal grating on a standard base! ;D

 

After I finish and 'seal' this guy, I will go back and add a dab of glossy polyurethane to the jewels to give it that extra glossy shine!