Painting the Mountain King's Loin Cloth

Next up in the saga of the Elemental King, I've got a brief article on his loin cloth. (haha) Not really anything fancy going on here, but I'll cover it nonetheless.


Base Coat

As I've demonstrated before, stippling / sponging is a great way to paint leather because of the texture it adds. So as an undercoat, I've painted some layers of mixed size dots by changing up how firm I'm pressing the sponge onto the surface. I want the cloth to be red when I'm done, so I use a number of red and browns of different brightnesses. Because of the nature of leather, don't even wait for paint to dry - let it mix.

At this stage, don't worry about the details of stitching that hold the sections together. That'll get painted later.

Painting the Mountain King's Skin

Today I'm going to demonstrate the number 1 question I received during the Mountain King project - How I painted his skin.

There were a lot of steps to it, but I'll show the ones that stand out. Most of the photos are hi-res so you can click them to get a more detailed view.

Overall, it basically came down to:

- Stippling with a sponge.
- Airbrushing.
- Painting deep shadows.
- Highlighting with weathering powders.
- Shading subtle shadows.
- Varnish.