John Hancock Minibust

To encourage myself to post more I'm going to start doing regular updates on my WIP projects. They'll usually go into some of the decisions I'm making, the kit I'm using and some other bits around the project. They'll then be gathered up and posted on the portfolio page once done. So without further ado, here's the project journal for the John Hancock bust from Big Child Creatives.

So I started the bust as a bit of a downtime project after Christmas, I was still on annual leave and resting off the demands of the season and wanted something a little different to paint. Usually I'd jump into my STL library and print something off but due to an unfortunate accident involving my last new FEP and a screwdriver my printer was out of commission until I could get a new one delivered. This meant I had to look through my pile of opportunity (I've got a post in the works about the benefit of cutting through the pile of opportunity so keep your eyes out) which is when I came across the John Hancock mini-bust. I love the look of the full bust but right now I'm not 100% confident in the skills needed, definitely one for the future though.

After drilling out some plinths I'd 3D printed, I mounted it up, airbrushed a zenithal highlight using the black and white pro-acryl primers. After giving it a day to cure (again this was the holiday season and an off-the-cuff project) I then started laying in the skin tones, this was where things went a little bit screwy, for various reasons I just wasn't happy with how the skin tones were going on, I couldn't build the volumes how I wanted and all round wasn't overly thrilled with the look of it. So I made the choice to strip it of paint and try again. Second time round things went a lot smoother, the blends worked how I hoped and the volumes were built much more effectively, leading to this result.

The skin tones were done using the following pro-acryl paints, blending in between to smooth the layering:

- Dark Flesh

- Shadow Flesh

- Tan Flesh

After getting the body looking good I started to lay down the face tones

After getting the skin looking close to how I wanted I started to block in the basecoats on the rest of the model and at this moment realised where I'd made my life probably a bit harder than it really needed to be.

By laying down the skin tones and getting the gradients quite smooth it really reduced my margin of error for the other more fiddly parts (a theme I continue through this project). That said I managed to get the eyes/eye to a level I was happy with.

New years came and went and unfortunately it was back to the real world again for a bit. I started to work on the jade "armour" on the shoulder, I started off by using pro-acryl's Jade and Bright Jade, laying down a base coat of Jade with the brush and then using a bit of sponge to apply a "highlight" using the bright jade, this left a really nice mottled texture that with a very thin glaze of Jade I was really happy with.

This is then where maybe I should stay away from social media, I started to grow dissatisfied with the skin tones, they were fine, just very flat and little interest. So I went back in with very thin coats of Olive Flesh from pro-acryl, building up bright spots on the forehead and nose, as well as the main chest area. I think the end result does look better and if I were to do it again I'd probably have more dark spots away from where the light source is coming from.

I also started to add in the NMM on the sections in between the jade "armour". I then glazed a thin coat of Bright Jade mixed with Golden Yellow and Pale Yellow onto the armour to build up the highlights more and generate more interest.

And that is where the project stands right now, there's a bit more NMM gone down but I'm still refining it in. I've blocked in the hair as black for now but I really like how some of the WIP shots look with just the zenithal coat, I think the contrast between that and the skin tone works really well so there's fairly good odds I'll go back in change the hair to grey/white. So far this has been a really interesting project to do, it's had some challenges but that's half the fun of painting in truth is not doing the same thing you've done every time. As an aside all of the paint here unless otherwise mentioned is from Pro-Acryl, I'm a big fan of their range, the matte finish is excellent and their naming makes it really easy to find the colours I'm looking for so I'd definitely recommend them to anyone looking to try something new.

As I'd left it on the last journal I'd finished up the skin tone, got the armour and NMM looking good and was happy with the progress I'd made. That said I was still unsure about the hair, and after trying a few different ways of doing black hair I had to conced that it didn't look right on the model so I used the black as a deep shadow tone and moved towards a blueish-grey.

By keeping the black as an under-layer I was able to achieve an almost salt and pepper-ish look which I was overall pretty happy with. I filled out the NMM across the rest of the model using the same process as before and started on the eye-visor/lens. I glazed a thin coat of burnt burgundy aiming for the highlight to finish towards the top of the lens. Once I'd got sufficient saturation I gave it a filter layer of bold pyrrole red to boost the saturation a little further and smooth the blend out.

At this point I was pretty much done, I spent a bit of time neatening out some points where my brush had gone rogue and used a grey/grey-white blend to paint some texture onto the bandage and resprayed the plinth. At this point I was done if not satisfied, there are some places especially with the NMM I would really want to have another go at, I'd also want to try some better hair techniques as I feel it looks really rough at the moment but the overall result is below:

This was a really fun little bust to paint and not a bad intro to v-busts as a whole, definitely going to keep my out in the future for similar things to try my hand at.