Excursions Beyond the Call of Duty: Boot Black

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Boot Black

The last post dealt with the reddish brown coat. I took some photos of what this did for the scheme of things.

This second coat added brown and crimson tones. Plenty of the green still shows through. The next step will be to add some blacks. I mentioned adding blue before, might as well do so now. I could do such a thing by mixing up a chromatic black, but instead I thought I'd try something a little bit different. Maybe some charcoal. I rummaged around and found my old pastel box, something I used to tote with me into the woods. In there was some stick charcoal, some vine charcoal, and some conte crayon (amongst other things). Those pastel sticks might come into play later. We'll see.

I started by crushing the stick charcoal into the freshly cleaned dish. I grabbed some matte medium. No need to make things too glossy.

I dissolved the charcoal into the water, and added the matte medium. I added a dash of cobalt blue acrylic. This was tedious, and I don't recommend it. It created an irregular slurry, and looked like this:

I started using this, but it was too weak. I needed to add more binder, and more blue. This is what it ended up looking like. I could grab a little blue, a little medium, and mix them on a charcoal block. Then I would dip into the slurry to shade dark areas (armpits, underneath chins, other shadows) on the figures as needed, or to "wash out" where the paint- if you can call it that- was too dark.

Here's how it looked half-way through the night.

Sgt. Sombodi looks over the mess. From the left: Cobalt blue, the slurry, charcoal block, acrylic matte medium.

I started making the guns and metal a bit more blue, and the boots mostly black. Once the charcoal block absorbed enough slurry, it stopped fighting my brush (still that same cheap one from Michael's) and came up a bit more easily.