Hello fellow orc enthusiasts! (Which I am not but hey, here we are) Its Orctober25 and I was tasked to do a posts about orcs. So I decided to do four. Here is the last one! We are going through my process for a competition piece. I am on a work trip so photos will be a little different from usual and painting maybe not so sharp as the 12 hour shifts of construction take their toll. At least the hotel life is sucky now that we had to change hotel and I don’t have desk any more… Anyway the great saga comes to an end!

This process is going to be shown through pictures that I showed to people that gave the piece critique and looked at it with a keen eye for detail. I ll be telling and showing you what I fixed, thought and painted.

I wanted a poppy bright yellow armour, cold steel blades and bright green skin. These were the basis of my pieces idea. Some where on the line I started to think about basing. I first went towards green , then sandy colours and quickly ditched both. Then I tried desaturated purple and felt like that is the answer. So with the base coats all done and highlights sketched I started to refine things one at the time. Starting from the pants and leather parts. Then steel sections, bone, yellow armour, skin, white cloths… Trying to go from inside towards out. I had to re do and fix many times as messed up with my painting. After the fixes I was done for the first round of critique. I tried to show my piece to as many people I dared to. I was open that this was a competition piece and that it was still an early wip.

Then it was onto the fixing stage. I got a lot of comments and tried to pick from them the most based ones and some that I wiped with. Main points. More contrast between shadows and lights on the armour. And more smoothness to the skins transitions. I took this suggestion on board and painted deeper shadows.

I was also suggested to add magenta/violet to shadows that are more further away from the base. This I did not implement as I felt like the base is too dark to reflect light so high up.

I corrected some shadows, smoothed the skin a bit. Then asked for the next round of critique.

More brighter highlights, NMM highlights and shadows had been dulled by glazing, so readjustment was proposed. I was also instructed to go paler with the severed heads and highlighting more some minor areas.

So I worked on them. Pushing highlights up. I also made the NMM steel even colder. Made the heads paler, fixed some other trophys… And at this stage I felt like the skin and the earring didn’t work anymore. I let the skin simmer, but I had to fix it somehow. I decided to go with a colder steel colour for the earring rather than the bright magenta.

Then the final round of critiques. Nothing much came up. But one comment on the skin really hit me. “Not all shadows are created equal.” Even though I knew this. It just never pop up in my head as an answer to my problem. I fixed the shadows to be less stark on the face area, and as I was doing it I also got an idea. Less chroma. I had too much colour trying to take attention.

I decided to fix both thing at the same time by using velatura. Changing the skin tone to be more pale green rather than so chartreuse I managed to give this piece a little bit more breathing space and harmony. With velatura I managed to fix the stark shadows and my colour problem and so came this piece to an end.

With this The final photos, entering this piece to a Gallant Goblins Orctober competition and my torment for orctober content comes to an end. But fret not orc enjoyer! The orcs always come back…