USING BROKEN HUES PAINTING SIR KAY TUTORIAL BY RUBEN MARTINEZ Direction: José Manuel Palomares. Art direction: Pedro Núñez, José Manuel Palomares, Hugo Gómez Briones, Rubén Martínez, Alex Muñoz. Project management and administration: Helio de Grado, Lola Ramilo. Concept art: Pedro Núñez. Graphic design: Manuel Domínguez, Aleksandra Bilich, Jessica Mur, Andrea Mª Villa. Sculpting: Adrián Rio, Alejandro Muñoz, Daniel Fernández-Truchaud, Hugo Gómez, Iván Santurio, Natalia Romero. Painting: Ruben Martinez, David Arroba, Jaime de Garnica, Andy Wardle, Marc Masclans, Arnau Lázaro, Miguel Matías, Michal Pisarski, Krzysztof Kobalczyk, Pepe Gallardo. Resin production: Chema Ruiz, Pablo Solana, María Martínez, Saúl Palacios, David Chozas, Fernando Cazallas, Luis Llorente, Carmen Núñez, Sergio Ajenjo. Video edition: Elena Moreno. INDEX Sir Kay 04 Using broken hues: Tutorial by Ruben Martinez Gallery 20 Catalogue 26 SR KAY Work: basing and painting Scale: 75mm Brand: Bigchild Creatives It was at the Golden Demon edition in Madrid that I won my first awards as a miniature painter. I was awarded the Slayer Sword in both 2010 and 2011, and I have been working as a professional miniature painter ever since. For some years now, I have been working alongside José Manuel Palomares, Iván Santurio and Hugo Gómez at Bigchild Creatives as a partner and Painting Department’s Director. @rma_ruben_martinez @rma.miniatures INTRODUCTION At BigChild Creatives we have always been committed to adapting our painting style according to the project we have on the table. With painting, different emotions or sensations can be transmitted, and this is why this versatility is so important. Bright and saturated colors can transmit energy, vividness and intensity in the artwork and its message, while more muted colors are used to express melancholy, serenity or even sadness. Although our most common record has been characterized by intense colors and strong contrasts (as can be seen in previous Black Sailors projects or even Zombicide and Marvel United), in Echoes of Camelot the trend is clearly different. Pedro Nuñez marked a style in his illustrations of the characters that was overflowing with mysticism and covered this entire universe with a nostalgic veil of a magical era long past. The palette continued having vivid colors, but the predominance of more desaturated colors made us have to adapt when painting these miniatures. In the following pages I will show you how I approached the painting on Sir Kay, based on concept art, and how to play with those more desaturated tones without the final result being gray and lifeless, since in broken hues you can also find vibrating colors. WHAT ARE BROKEN HUES? We all know the primary and secondary colors. These colors are represented in the well-known chromatic circle. The six-part circle is a simplified way of looking at it, but I think it is good to explain it in a very basic way to understand it better. The primary colors (yellow, red and blue) are the purest that we can find and therefore they are the most saturated colors that exist. The secondary ones are obtained by mixing the primary ones together two by two. For example mixing yellow and red, we will obtain orange. As they are formed by mixing very saturated colors with each other, we will have that secondary colors can also be considered very saturated colors. 4 USING BROKEN HUES Well, broken hues are the opposite. They are the desaturated colors, or what is the same, those that are not the primary or secondary colors that we can observe in the previous chromatic circle. For example, browns, grays, pinks, khaki green, ochre, skin tones, etc. we could classify them as broken hues. Look at the amount of things we paint with these colors! From this we deduce how to obtain the broken hues. The easy option (or also for experienced painters) is to go to the store and buy us some pots of those colors, however it is the least recommended option because your mixtures will be taken from pots that cannot have a correct color ratio. For example if I want to shade something green and I have bought a dark green for it. The interesting thing would be that if the lights are warm (a green with some yellow for example) we paint some dark green shadows but with a colder temperature, that is to say a dark green with some blue, which could be a dark turquoise. This temperature contrast will make the color vibrate and create much more interesting contrasts. The problem with using the colors from the can is that I may be shading that green with a dark khaki green because it is the one closest to my table, but that color is of a warmer trend than would be desirable to create that contrast by temperature. Keep reading because when you finish this tutorial you will see that it is not that complicated! OBTAINING THE BROKEN HUES It is better to get used to and understand where these broken hues come from. Broken colors are obtained by desaturating the colors on the color wheel. The browns are obtained by desaturating the orange or red. Ochres are obtained by desaturating yellow and cool grays are obtained by desaturating blues and greens. The logical question that you will be asking yourself now is: how do I desaturate a color? The answer is very simple. A color is desaturated by mixing it with A LITTLE of its complementary, the complementary colors being those that are opposite in the chromatic circle. For example, if I want to desaturate an orange hue, I just have to add a little blue that is opposite the orange in the color wheel. This way we will obtain a brown, and if you test it on your palette you will see that it is true. 5 SR KAY WORKING WITH THE BROKEN HUES So far the theoretical part, which although it may be dense I think is essential to understand the process shown below. Just remember a couple of details that I always keep in mind while painting. One of them is the temperature contrast that I mentioned earlier, in which the “pictorial rule” says that if the lights are warm, the shadows must be cold, and vice versa. Another more particular thing about broken hues is that they are lightened with white and darkened with their complementary. In the case of white, it is often corrected with a little yellow if we want to make the lights warm, or a little blue if we want to cool the lights. But to darken them you should NOT use black, being better to add the complementary hue to the mixtures. I emphasize not using black, because this pigment will take away all the chromatic information and we will lose that vibration of color so sought after among painters. In the same way, I want to emphasize that grays are NOT made by mixing black and white for the same reason. FIRST STEPS ON SIR KAY Before starting to paint it is important to define a few aspects such as the color scheme. In this case it is an issue that is resolved only because I will stick to the illustration of the character. Another thing to decide is the light main direction. Because of how the character is posed, I decided that the lighting that I liked the most was with the light shining from above and tilted somewhat to the right. Using the double primer method I set this from the beginning, so that first I paint the entire figure with black spray and then I apply a few bursts with white spray from that same direction so that it naturally marks where the light planes of the entire sculpture are, this being my main reference throughout the painting process. 6 USING BROKEN HUES As an additional trick, I will tell you that the head is fixed with a little blue tack so that it can be painted separately more comfortably. STARTING TO APPLY THE COLOR It is time to put into practice everything seen in the theoretical part, so I trust that now all the doubts you may have will be dispelled, since you can see that it is not as complex as it seemed. I start with the doublet by applying a base color for the light and for the shadows. For the lights I mixed a medium ochre cream color by desaturating a yellow. Mixing yellow with a little purple we will see with we obtain an ochre color. I also added white to lighten it and a touch of blue to cool it down, since I want the temperature of the lights to be cold in general to obtain a very specific atmosphere like the one you will see in the final photos. You can see the exact color in the photos and I applied it in the areas that the double primer made clearer. I painted the shadows in a similar way but where the black primer was more evident. For these shadows I darkened the color of the lights with their complementary. To do this, we must NOT look for the complementary of ochre since we will not find it in the chromatic circle, if we do not take into account the main color to which the color we want to desaturate or break belongs, that is, yellow (I obtained ochre by desaturating the yellow). That is why I added a little more purple to the mix of the lights to darken it and get a color for the shadows consistent with my palette. We could use a muted dark brown color that we have in a can on our table, but I think that in addition to being more fun, mixing the color with logic will obtain better results.