First Figure. Tamiya Luftwaffe Ace.

Nice for being your first, indeed! Way better than mine...

 

You should try to stick with one colour range when doing figures... Start with a dark blue and build up with lighter blues and finish with a very light blue on the very tops...   I rarely use any black wash (I sometimes use them, but rarely)  

 

But then again, I am a beginner in figurepainting aswell... just my two cents of my little experience..   People who have painted figures for double the time I have lived will give better advise, and maybe correct mine as well..

 

-Huxy 

Really good, but since he's a fighter pilot, he could stand a bit of tanning on the face... Fighter pilots kind of looked like the negative of a raccoon, with normal skin-tones around the eyes from wearing sunglasses or goggles, while the rest of the face darkened from the bright sun burning through the canopy, except those parts of the face covered by the flight helmet...

Like skiers?

This is a good start as a first figure, it really is. So don't take the following negatively.

Skin tone: it looks like you used a commercial flesh. I haven't found one that looks right. I start with beige red from Vallejo then add their game color dark fleshtone for shadows, add one or two of several light skin shades for highligts and finish with pale flesh for the top highlight.

Eyes: pretty good, but don't use white for the whites; it's too stark. I use the same pale flesh i use for my final highlight.

The vest: you've got a bunch of buckles and straps that call for shading, highlighting and, for the buckles, painting in a color differnt from the vest.

Unifirm: same advice as above for highlights and shadows around thwe pockets and seams.

Boots (black): start with a dark gray, use full black only for the deepest shadows, add flesh or light blue for warmer or cooler highlights.

Washes: the only place I'd have used a wash on this figure is in the hair.

Paint: If you're going to jump into the dark art of figures, I'd suggest investing in Vallejo acrylics. They are formulated for brush painting. Vallejo recommends distilled water for thinning, not an expensive proprietary thinner. By following their tutorial at their website, it will show you how to thin and layer your paint to get good transitions between shadow and highlight. It seems like a pricy product at first, but it lasts forever. I have some that's about ten years old and still works fine. The fact that it's thinned for use expands the volume of the bottle significantly.

Finally, photography: use a couple light sources to reduce shadows. If you can adjust your camera manually, try reducing the exposure and if you have the option, make sure your spot metering is on.

I actually mixed the flesh myself comparing it to my own skin.  Aside from the recesses of the boots I didn't use any black anywhere.  It just looks like it.  I did darken some of the shadow paints too dark though, which is why they look black in the photo's but just right under normal light.  The white is also not white, it's light gray.  Using a light flesh color for the eyes in a fig this big would look very unrealistic.  This is a 16th scale figure.

As for the photography, I am a photographer.  I just don't have a place to setup my photo booth right now, so I make do.  These were quicky pics, done on my desk with a couple of pieces of printer paper.  I also let Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 do all the work automatically for tone adjustments and stuff, as I was pressed for time.  The only lightsource I had was my overhead/behind light which is incadescent, and I had my diffused flash.  The two reasons why the light gray turns out so white are one Lightroom's auto tools as I said, and two I used the white balance setting associated with the flash, being lazy, instead of manually metering it myself like I usually do.  Alot of this was just time pressed and my sheer laziness.  If it weren't pouring down rain I would have metered the white balance specifically and did the photography outside, which probably would have made it look more like it does in person.

I'm probably not going to be getting too in depth into figures, just once in awhile.  So I won't be investing in any valejo paints.  In the future any figures will most likely have their main color airbrushed, for the clothing, and then all other colors through the whole thing(except the eyes perhaps), will be done with oils.

Nothing taken negatively though.  :)

stikpusher wrote:

Like skiers?

'Zackly..

I think you have established a very good foundation for future projects. You seem to have a much better grasp of the basics for your first figure than I did when I began figure painting. Overall I think that this figure is a fantastic start.

Good Job

Brian

nice fig!!!!