We're heading off to Birmingham later this week for the very first MegaCon (22/3/22) It's going to be at the NEC and we're pretty sure it'll be a goodie. One of the many guests at the show is Nikolaj Coster-Waldau aka Jaime Lannister. We've never seen Nikolaj at a con before so it's quite exciting!
Of course, we had to do a picture of him so here's a step by step
I've lined out the areas of light and dark that I want to play with and I went back to my old habit of starting with the eyes. Apparently, it's a much better idea to start with a mouth, since it's a better way of getting a likeness.
Now the mouth is in place, the likeness kicks in properly. I do find it amazing that even with very simple geometric shapes it's still easy to see a face.
All the face is in and framed by his hair, that's the next step
This stage was a pain in the hoo-ha! The delicacy of the Celtic knotwork, while it looks lovely, it took an absolute age to get right. First I put a base coat of the grey-white knotwork, then added a little shading to it. After that, the black lines went in to define the edges of the knotwork. Once that was all finished a number of black washes went over the piece to add more depth and shade.
Next came the background, I was pretty confident it would work, but when you have a decent looking picture, adding more elements to it can be a bit scary. Using red can be a massive pain because the opacity of this colour can be pretty low, so the brush strokes can be seen in it. Basically, it looks rubbish until you've added a few layers of paint so it looks more uniform.
The additional layers of red have gone over the painting to add a red tone to all the background. Lots and lots of washes to build up the colour, a wash is where you water the paint down so it's really dilute. That way you can control how deep you want the colour.
Pretty much finished, just added black lines around the sword throne to tidy it up. I want it to look graphic and pointy, so the lines cover up some of the wobbles that accumulate over the edges from many layers of wash.
There we go! Done and dusted
That's all for now, I'll do another couple of WIP's as I get around to it.
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Love and Glue
Symon