Shading white with oil colors?

[Karnstein]

Okay, will I got some ideas, I lack the experience with painting white to feel really comfortable (always skipped it as a primary color, same goes for yellow).

I do know that I want to end up with pure tabletop-quality (no show pieces) and I think that using oil colors instead of acrylic washes (say Vallejo Pale wash) could do the trick. Oil washes are are a bit more forgiving to use and clean up, thanks to the longer drying time.

I do have an airbrush, which I intend to use to lay down the base-coats really fast.

I start with showing you some pictures from other guys (who all paint way way better that I do and most likely ever will), using the same kind of models I intend to paint.

Official pictures from the producer:

http://privateerpress.com/files/products/circle-orboros/warbeasts/pureblood-warpwolf.png
http://privateerpress.com/files/products/72057_PurebloodWarpwolfWEB.jpg

Sadly the army book that comes with the faction skips on how they painted their whites. I do know that the guys from PP are heavily into two-brush blendings, which is a technique I can't replicate due to both a lack of skill and patience. For my unschooled eyes it looks like they didn't went for a straight grey color and used some of their more creamy colors like P3 Menoth or Cryx Bane highlight.

Picture from I guy I asked on the PP board: http://i951.photobucket.com/albums/ad354/mozznstein/Circle Orboros/100_3669.jpg

He told me that he used a mixture of Water, Matte Medium, Vallejo Black Grey and Vallejo Game Color Steel Grey to shade the model, which gave him a grey-blue tone. He started with a white base-coat, applied the mix to the shadows using a layering technique and then finished the skin with pure white again, touching up the raised areas where needed.

Given the fact that I do have a airbrush, which makes laying down gradients pretty easy, all those different approaches raise two big questions for me and I hope someone can give me some pointers. That doesn't relieves me of the task to paint some test models, but it may cut down on the amount of pieces I've got to paint and additional colors I may have to purchase first.

So here are the two big questions:

1. Do I want to use my airbrush simply to lay down a white base-coat, seal it with varnish and move directly to the oil-washes? Or do I want to spend the extra time and lay done a gradient. Say prime with Vallejo Surface Primer (either white or grey), hit the whole model with Vallejo Model Air 71046 Pale Grey Blue and then spray some kind of white (Vallejo Model air white, P3 Morrow White) down from a 75° angle?

2. What oil color should I use? I checked the W&N range and the only grey tone was "paynes grey". I don't own it yet, but I do own a small collection of W&N oil colors, incl. zinc white, lamp black, cobalt blue hue and french ultramarine. On a first glance paynes grey looks a bit dark, but it is a blue-grey color and it would allow me to stick with stock paints, compared to mixing my own grey using black, white and a small drop of blue.

My hope is that using the oil wash and simply cleaning it up with a q-tip dabbed in mineral spirits, gives me a decent white skin tone w/o having to go over the model again with white, to make the highlights pop out.


Cheers from Germany,

Karnstein

 

[me_in_japan]

I suspect that you'd get the best results by

1) laying down a blue-grey base coat all over with your airbrush. At this point the mini will look much darker than you want it to be, but no worries.
2) use the airbrush to apply a zenithal highlight of lighter grey (maybe your base grey plus white, in a 50/50 mix)
3) use the airbrush to apply an even more zenithal highlight of pure white, focusing primarily on the face and shoulders.

Once this is done, you could then try carefully applying an oil wash. Not all over the mini, but try to keep it where you want it. e.g. the wrinkles in the snout and knuckles, around the eyes, and maybe around the chest muscles. Then you can use your swab to remove any wash that's in places you don't want it to be. Finally, some pure white applied by brush will probably be necessary to pick out any details that may have been slightly over-washed by your oils.

Hope that helps

 

[Patyrn]

I've been using oil washes on my warjacks and I think I can help you out.

What I do is airbrush the whole thing with my shade color, then apply brighter and more focused zenithal highlights all the way to pure white.

I clearcoat the model, and then matte varnish it. This has given me the best surface characteristics for the oil wash. Let that fully cure.

Now oil wash the whole model, but don't let it pool. Use it more as a filter than a wash. You can use greys/blues/browns etc depending on what kind of white you want. I use Burnt Umber and it gives the white a reddish brownish ivory quality.

Once the oil looks dry (30 minutes maybe)? Take some sponge, or cloth, or whatever (I use makeup sponge) and buff the surface of the model. Focus on areas you want brighter. It's really easy to get a hang of and gives you extremely nice soft shading for very little effort. You can slightly dampen whatever you're using with white spirits to remove the maximum amount of oil but be careful because you'll lose the softness if you leave a sharp clean line. If that happens just wait for the thinner to evaporate and work the edges with a dry sponge to soften it.

I'm positive this technique will work fantastically on something like a warpwolf with all that geometry to inform the highlights.

 

[Einion]

Karnstein, your basic idea sounds good but I think you'll benefit the most from doing the bulk of the work with the airbrush, so I would definitely recommend a method something along the lines of what me_in_japan suggested - not just because it's faster but in fact the results should be superior, significantly so if you do it right.

One thing I'm unsure about is why you seem to think you need so many blueish greys? The two pics from Privateer Press feature mostly quite neutral greys, the first one in particular. Even if you skipped using any blue in your mixes and just used various tints of black your greys would be too blueish, so you'd definitely not want to add any blue.

In terms of the oils, Payne's Grey is not a good choice - they're usually a simple mixture of a black with French Ultramarine, so effectively a coloured black and not a grey at all despite the name.

I wouldn't recommend you go with a pre-mixed grey anyway. One of the things about oils in general is not having ready-to-use colours available, so you might as well get used to the idea of mixing custom colours at some point... why not now?

You can find a much wider array of readymade greys from some other makers (Schmincke comes to mind specifically) but for the long term it's well worth learning to mix for yourself. If you're worried about consistency just be accurate with your measurements and write down the proportions you use and there should be no problems with mixing the same colour again in future.

The mix I'd suggest if you want a fairly neutral grey is white (not Zinc White ideally), with a little black and a touch of Burnt Umber.

Whatever colour you decide on I don't think you should make a wash out of it strictly speaking, instead I'd thin it less so the consistency is a little more soupy - more a glaze than a wash. This consistency will stay where it's put better and won't tend to flow anywhere you don't want it to go, or to settle down into recesses in the way a wash does.

Einion

 

[Karnstein]

Thx for all the replies so far... I'm only quoting Einion, since he raises some serious questions I didn't thought about before.

Karnstein, your basic idea sounds good but I think you'll benefit the most from doing the bulk of the work with the airbrush, so I would definitely recommend a method something along the lines of what me_in_japan suggested - not just because it's faster but in fact the results should be superior, significantly so if you do it right.

Yeah, I got no problem with that. My only worry was that the gradient achieved was so low, that it wasn't worth the hassle. I mean you can't highlight pure white, so the color range is a bit more limited compared to let's say apple green or Denim blue, where you can both shade and highlight your base color through the addition of other colors.

If that's an unjustified fear, I don't mind going for 2-3 zenithal highlights and finishing with carefully airbrushing on small opaque patches of pure white on the really exposed areas, using a very fine needle and low pressure. I only need some rough guidelines where to start.

One thing I'm unsure about is why you seem to think you need so many blueish greys? The two pics from Privateer Press feature mostly quite neutral greys, the first one in particular. Even if you skipped using any blue in your mixes and just used various tints of black your greys would be too blueish, so you'd definitely not want to add any blue.

Ugh, that's a pretty good question. We are talking about my intention to start with with a grey primer, use VMA pale grey blue as a basecoat and hightlight from there, right? Not only about picking an oil wash, that has a lot of blue in it?

Like I said, I'm lacking experience with whites and I wanted to have them look like wolfs, that can blend into snow. Can't say if the idea is a good one, given the fact that most of my Infantry models wear some leather beach-style clothing, which is a bit odd if it's snowing like hell outside....

I hope it isn't a illogical move to first take a look at how the Producer paints his whites. I don't know if they had a recipe for white wolf skin in one of their old Mk1 releases, but in their new releases I can only find 2 tutorials for white in general and both are not from the circle book. That book only has a skin recipe, where they start with a creamy basecoat (menoth white highlight + khaki and a warm grey) and then shade most of that creamy skin tone away with different shades of brown, leaving it only look through right on top of the muscles.

The two white recipes are both from the Warmachine range, predominately used for body armor and steam-powered robots. There is the more creamy white of menoth, which they shade with warm greys and go for a ivory color with white highlights. Really warm white this is... the other one is from the Retribution book, where they used a pure white (morrow white) and added a drop of light blue-gray (underbelly blue) into the base-color, shading it through adding greys to the base-tone. Which makes the look a bit cooler, while the Menoth recipe with its shades of ivory is a bit warmer in my opinion.

I may be overcautious, but my reason for going for a colder white was the following: There are a lot of teeth, claws and spikes on the warpwolf model, along with some small parts of armor, fur and leather clothing. If I go for a creamy white with some shades of brown and ivory to make it pop out, wouldn't that risk blending with the classical ivory color for tusk and teeth?

But I think in the end it comes down to something else (correct me if I'm wrong): What are the colors I intend to use for the other models, esp. those with normal cloth and "human" flesh? And I'm honest and say that I didn't though a lot about how well those work together , except for uniform colors on the armor plates.

Beyond the white skin for the wolfs, I intended to do the following:

- Paint the rims of the armor plates with old gold from Vallejos Liquid Gold range. I may prefer bronze, but those colors are pretty hard to get your hands on w/o spending ridiculous shipping fees for a single 35ml bottle.
- Go for green lacquered look in the recesses of the armor, using DIY Dayglow colors made by mixing fluorescent green pigments with an acrylic binder medium. Need to experiment a bit how to best apply them (white basecoat or just as a glaze on top of green mottled with yellow), but I do like the overall effect. Got the idea from massivevoodoo roughly one year ago and picked up a big bag of pigments, which are still sitting somewhere in my shelf.
- Use some shades of green for clothes made of woven fabric. So the overall theme would be white&green.
- Browns for leather clothes, belts and straps.
- Skin on human models like the warlocks and the living infantry choices should look healthy, but not overly sun-tanned and not frost-bitten either. Yeah, which is kind of odd given the wolf colors... I know that ^^

On a first glance that looks like a bunch of warm colors. Which raises the question: Won't it look a bit odd if some models are predominately painted with cold colors (beasts), while the rest is not. And if I change the tone of the white on my beasts, that should have some impact on the oil colors I use to shade the models.

In terms of the oils, Payne's Grey is not a good choice - they're usually a simple mixture of a black with French Ultramarine, so effectively a coloured black and not a grey at all despite the name.

I wouldn't recommend you go with a pre-mixed grey anyway. One of the things about oils in general is not having ready-to-use colours available, so you might as well get used to the idea of mixing custom colours at some point... why not now? You can find a much wider array of readymade greys from some other makers (Schmincke comes to mind specifically) but for the long term it's well worth learning to mix for yourself. If you're worried about consistency just be accurate with your measurements and write down the proportions you use and there should be no problems with mixing the same colour again in future. The mix I'd suggest if you want a fairly neutral grey is white (not Zinc White ideally), with a little black and a touch of Burnt Umber.

My local DIY store stocks W&N and getting to the next art store with the tram takes me less than 30 minutes. That store pretty much sells everything, ranging from Schminke to other artist brands like Van Gogh or Bob Ross oil colors.

My stock right now consists of: Zinc White, Lamp Black, French Ultramarine, Cobalt Blue Hue, Oxide of Chromium, Cadmium Orange Hue, Burnt Umber, Van Dyke Brown and Caput mortuum deep.

I'm pretty much open to everything that works. I'm not dead set on using payne's grey or even staying with a cold-white skin tone, as long as it does end up looking natural. Which is my main gripe and fear with those two PP white recipes.

Whatever colour you decide on I don't think you should make a wash out of it strictly speaking, instead I'd thin it less so the consistency is a little more soupy - more a glaze than a wash. This consistency will stay where it's put better and won't tend to flow anywhere you don't want it to go, or to settle down into recesses in the way a wash does.

Einion

True, guess I worded that badly. I don't intend to soak the whole model with the oil colors. I'm going to apply them carefully into the shadows and the recesses between the muscles and then remove any unwanted spillage.

 

[Einion]

Yeah, I got no problem with that. My only worry was that the gradient achieved was so low, that it wasn't worth the hassle. I mean you can't highlight pure white, so the color range is a bit more limited compared to let's say apple green or Denim blue, where you can both shade and highlight your base color. Assuming of course that I pick a pure white for the basecoat color of course.

On this, yes, don't do that - as in the suggested steps, you don't start with white but with a darker base and work up. You can start in the mid range and work both darker and lighter but doing white it often works best to just work 'up'.

On this, the thing to bear in mind with whites is that the value range is smaller than with anything much darker, that's inherent to the colour. It has to be light overall to still look like it's white/ivory/cream, if you go too dark you lose a lot of that first impression of the colour (similar to what happens if you highlight black too light, it no longer looks like it's supposed to be black).

...I don't mind going for 2-3 zenithal highlights and finishing with carefully airbrushing on small patches of pure white on the exposed areas, using a very fine needle and low pressure.

There's actually no real need to spray very tight and controlled for this. I used to use a single-action spraygun for zenithal spraying and that worked just as well as with a double-action AB - it's the sculpt itself (the 3D surface) that does most of the work, by catching the light paint in the right way. You don't have to direct it or aim it per se, hence the ease of the technique; this relates to why it can give such great results too, because the surface catches the highlight mixes in a very similar way to how it catches light you get very realistic highlighting.

I may be overcautious, but my reason for going for a colder white was the following: There are a lot of teeth, claws and spikes on the warpwolf model, along with some small parts of armor, fur and leather clothing. If I go for a creamy white with some shades of brown and ivory to make it pop out, wouldn't that risk blending with the classical ivory color for tusk and teeth?

That's a valid concern. Painting 'white' items adjacent to 'white' items of a different material is always going to present some challenge in getting it to look good (mostly, not to look boring). You do have to accept that the subject matter does naturally present a smaller range though.

Artists these days do often exaggerate colour differences to separate things more - blueish contrasted with neutrals and cream or beige whites - and you can do this as much or as little as you like. I prefer when the colour differences aren't exaggerated (numerous ways of distinguishing things, don't have to rely so much on this) but taste varies and you should go with what you prefer. I like to avoid is going blueish when shading whites if the natural material would normally be a perfectly neutral colour, in which case neutral shadows are appropriate. For teeth, ivory etc. if you did still want to use colour to distinguish them you only need to go a little more yellowish or brownish. It's a lesser contrast admittedly but I find it enough.

My local DIY store stocks W&N and getting to the next art store with the tram takes me less than 30 minutes. That store pretty much sells everything, ranging from Schminke to other artist brands like Van Gogh or Bob Ross oil colors.

My stock right now consists of: Zinc White, Lamp Black, French Ultramarine, Cobalt Blue Hue, Oxide of Chromium, Cadmium Orange Hue, Burnt Umber, Van Dyke Brown and Caput mortuum deep.

I'm not in favour of recommending buying more paints as a rule as often they're not an automatic fix* and while you could do with having a white that's more opaque you can start now with what you have, definitely enough colours to get going.

You can mix a neutral or near-neutral grey in many ways. With what you have currently both of these should work well:
Lamp Black + Burnt Umber;
French Ultramarine + Van Dyke Brown.

These two as well possibly:
Caput Mortuum Deep + Oxide Of Chromium;
Cobalt Blue Hue + Cadmium Orange Hue.

The first one listed is the easiest and usually the most reliable method, so while it would be well worth your time trying them all and comparing results in the future if you want the simplest and most repeatable way of mixing neutrals that's the combo you'll probably want to rely on for most of them**.

I'm pretty much open to everything that works. I'm not dead set on using payne's grey or even staying with a cold-white skin tone, as long as it does end up looking natural. Which is my main gripe and fear with those two PP white recipes.

Well if we go back to that first pic from PP, if you like that look then you'd definitely want to avoid going blueish on the skin shading since in the photo at least the shading is quite neutral.

*Practice or experimentation will often provide the solution.

**For lighter values a yellow earth is often recommended for best results, however a very light tint of your Cadmium Orange Hue with a tiny amount of black may work perfectly well.

Einion

 

[KruleBear]

Sounds like an interesting project. If you have time, do a wip thread on your progress.

 

[Pygmalion]

Zinc white, which you mentioned you had, is a weak, translucent white with cold blueish undertones. In recent years studies have shown it to behave catastrophically in oil, turning quite brittle and cracking appallingly in older paintings. I can find links to the studies if you like,

Titanium white is probably a better color to use. It is strongly opaque with a slight warmish cast, moreso in both cases in oil paints than acrylics.

 

[Einion]

It's long been known that Zinc White is prone to cracking - I've recommended against its use for more than 10 years, since well before the recent study was authored.

But we have to bear in mind the context, the extremely thin layers and the rigid substrate. Many of the typical problems that oil paintings exhibit as they age are down to the use of a natural-fibre fabric support; compare the condition of canvas paintings to those done on copper and the differences can be astounding.

Einion

 

[Karnstein]

May I start mentioning that my my heads hurts after trying to comprehend everything said about mixing colors? :doctor: ... guess I managed to forget everything about color-theory I may have ever learnt back in school and I have to admit that craft&art was my second most hated subject after French. So please bear with me and my slow understanding. :wink:

Well if we go back to that first pic from PP, if you like that look then you'd definitely want to avoid going blueish on the skin shading since in the photo at least the shading is quite neutral.

Yeah, after I slept on the "warm vs cold white" conundrum a bit, I came up with the decision that one army with cold colors is enough and I rather emphasize the "tree-hugging" closeness to nature a faction made of by druids, bloodthirsty savages and werewolf's with warm&earthy colors, which would clash a bit with cold bluish-white skin.

Which brings me to the next quote and the next question:

On this, yes, don't do that - as in the suggested steps, you don't start with white but with a darker base and work up. You can start in the mid range and work both darker and lighter but doing white it often works best to just work 'up'.

On this, the thing to bear in mind with whites is that the value range is smaller than with anything much darker, that's inherent to the colour. It has to be light overall to still look like it's white/ivory/cream, if you go too dark you lose a lot of that first impression of the colour (similar to what happens if you highlight black too light, it no longer looks like it's supposed to be black).

So what do I pick, if I stay with either Model Air and/or P3 Paints from Privateer Press? With a Zenithal Highlight approach, that consists of either 3 of 4 steps, a pure white like P3 Morrow White or VMA001 White would be my last and final step. And only the first step, which gets eradicated except for the deepest shadows that don't get covered by the following steps, should be "dark", unless I want to risk the end result not looking like something ranging from ivory/cream to pure white on the highlights.

If I look at the P3 range and simply grab warm colors, that are either warm greys, creamy whites or khaki, I would come up with the following colors:

Morrow White or VMA White= final highlight
Menoth White highlight: maybe not for the first coat, that goes all over the model but def. one of the highlights that get sprayed on with a low angle
Menoth white Base: Either the basecoat or the first angle
Hammerfall Khaki or Cryx Bane Highlight: Not necessarily as a pure coat, but maybe in a 1:1 mix with Menoth white base to mute it down a bit? I do own the bane highlight, but I guess the Khaki would give me a softer transition and keep the overall effect more creamy.

In any case I would like to stay away from Model Color and Game Color... P3 and VMA are colors I know how to shot through my gun w/o running into too much troubles.

That's a valid concern. Painting 'white' items adjacent to 'white' items of a different material is always going to present some challenge in getting it to look good (mostly, not to look boring). You do have to accept that the subject matter does naturally present a smaller range though.

Artists these days do often exaggerate colour differences to separate things more - blueish contrasted with neutrals and cream or beige whites - and you can do this as much or as little as you like. I prefer when the colour differences aren't exaggerated (numerous ways of distinguishing things, don't have to rely so much on this) but taste varies and you should go with what you prefer. I like to avoid is going blueish when shading whites if the natural material would normally be a perfectly neutral colour, in which case neutral shadows are appropriate. For teeth, ivory etc. if you did still want to use colour to distinguish them you only need to go a little more yellowish or brownish. It's a lesser contrast admittedly but I find it enough.

I guess starting I settle with the brownish and maybe glaze some pink around the places where the spikes leave the skin, to hint at irritated flesh.

I'm not in favour of recommending buying more paints as a rule as often they're not an automatic fix* and while you could do with having a white that's more opaque you can start now with what you have, definitely enough colours to get going.

You can mix a neutral or near-neutral grey in many ways. With what you have currently both of these should work well:
Lamp Black + Burnt Umber;
French Ultramarine + Van Dyke Brown.

These two as well possibly:
Caput Mortuum Deep + Oxide Of Chromium;
Cobalt Blue Hue + Cadmium Orange Hue.

The first one listed is the easiest and usually the most reliable method, so while it would be well worth your time trying them all and comparing results in the future if you want the simplest and most repeatable way of mixing neutrals that's the combo you'll probably want to rely on for most of them**.

*Practice or experimentation will often provide the solution.

**For lighter values a yellow earth is often recommended for best results, however a very light tint of your Cadmium Orange Hue with a tiny amount of black may work perfectly well.

That's the point where my brain melted... so mixing each pair of colors would give me a neutral&warm grey? The only stuff I could remember from school was that black+white=grey and that mixing all three primary colors nets me a grey too. Guess it's back to color-theory school for me...:laugh:

Zinc white, which you mentioned you had, is a weak, translucent white with cold blueish undertones. In recent years studies have shown it to behave catastrophically in oil, turning quite brittle and cracking appallingly in older paintings. I can find links to the studies if you like,

Titanium white is probably a better color to use. It is strongly opaque with a slight warmish cast, moreso in both cases in oil paints than acrylics.

Well, getting titanium white wouldn't bankrupt me... but if I got Einion right I could mix a grey w/o using white at all...

 

[Einion]

May I start mentioning that my my heads hurts after trying to comprehend everything said about mixing colors? :doctor: ... guess I managed to forget everything about color-theory I may have ever learnt back in school and I have to admit that craft&art was my second most hated subject after French. So please bear with me and my slow understanding. :wink:

Don't sweat it! It's not a subject that comes naturally to most painters so nobody else should beat themselves up about it.

One thing about school to start with, a lot of the very basic mixing concepts we learn as children are perfectly good starting points - when you mix blue with yellow you will get green, yellow with red mixes orange, that sort of thing. But not all of it holds true unfortunately; it's quite easy to mix a red and a blue and not get purple for example. And the specific outcome (how bright or dull a mix is, how dark or light it might turn out) is a lot more complex.

So what do I pick, if I stay with either Model Air and/or P3 Paints from Privateer Press?

Sorry, can't really help you with this as I'm not familiar with those paints firsthand. Someone else might have some recommendations but honestly I think you'd be better off going with what looks like it would work, play with various combos and see how they turn out.

I guess starting I settle with the brownish and maybe glaze some pink around the places where the spikes leave the skin, to hint at irritated flesh.

Sounds good.

That's the point where my brain melted... so mixing each pair of colors would give me a neutral&warm grey?

Hehe, the first two should certainly be capable of achieving perfect or near-perfect neutrals and you can of course weight either mixture towards the brown side if you wanted... I hate 'colour temperature' terminology and avoid it like the plague so I wouldn't call them warm greys. If you're interested I can go into detail at another time about why you'd be better off ditching the idea almost entirely.

The second two mixes have a decent chance of working, but no way to be sure without trying them (they're based on theory, not specific knowledge of the paints you have).

The only stuff I could remember from school was that black+white=grey and that mixing all three primary colors nets me a grey too.

Mixing neutrals is a really complex area with a few common pitfalls, one of which is that many things you read don't take into account that paints aren't colours, which means that paints sometimes (often actually) don't behave the way that you'd expect from theory.

Guess it's back to color-theory school for me...:laugh:

Well you're in the right place for that :glasses-cool:

Well, getting titanium white wouldn't bankrupt me... but if I got Einion right I could mix a grey w/o using white at all...

Yes, very very dark grey usually though - some neutral mixes are essentially blacks in fact and for ease of use you really do need to mix them down to greys.

By all means get a Titanium White if you like, it's the white I'd recommend the most anyway as it's very opaque, a good strong tinter and cheap to boot. If you get it it would be worth doing side-by-side comparisons of equal tints of various colours with it and your Zinc White, note the differences in the outcomes (duller and lighter for the TW mixes, a little more vivid and darker for the ZW mixes).

Einion

 

[Karnstein]

Hehe, the first two should certainly be capable of achieving perfect or near-perfect neutrals and you can of course weight either mixture towards the brown side if you wanted... I hate 'colour temperature' terminology and avoid it like the plague so I wouldn't call them warm greys. If you're interested I can go into detail at another time about why you'd be better off ditching the idea almost entirely.

Okay, guess I'm off to the DIY store tomorrow and get titanium white. Any other oil color you would recommend for a small collection? One that allows experimenting around with?

And yes, feel free to elaborate on that "I don't like color temperature" part. Nearly every single color-theory page I digged up yesterday with some google-fu droned on and one about warm and cold colors.

 

[Einion]

Okay, guess I'm off to the DIY store tomorrow and get titanium white. Any other oil color you would recommend for a small collection? One that allows experimenting around with?

Looking back on what you already have, you could do with having a proper red and yellow if you want to be able to mix around the colour wheel fully. See the other current thread on oils for a little more on this, just posted my usual recommendations for a starter palette with some reasons for each selection.

And yes, feel free to elaborate on that "I don't like color temperature" part. Nearly every single color-theory page I digged up yesterday with some google-fu droned on and one about warm and cold colors.

Not surprised. I bet not one of them mentioned anything about how vague it is or how irregularly it's used!

Einion

 

[Karnstein]

No, none of them did...

... another -yet related- question: jabbayoda aka Schnauzerface used dry pigments along with oil colors to get more color-variety into the shadows&recesses of his mountain king model. Am I right with the assumption, that picking pigment colors (buying cheap artist pastel crayons) for creating depth and color variation follows roughly the same guidelines we already talked about? So either neutral grey tones, creamy tones like ivory and light flesh/pink tones?

 

[Einion]

... another -yet related- question: jabbayoda aka Schnauzerface used dry pigments along with oil colors to get more color-variety into the shadows&recesses of his mountain king model. Am I right with the assumption, that picking pigment colors (buying cheap artist pastel crayons) for creating depth and color variation follows roughly the same guidelines we already talked about? So either neutral grey tones, creamy tones like ivory and light flesh/pink tones?

Yep, regardless of the medium use something like the same colours and you'll achieve similar results.

Einion

 

[Pygmalion]

If you're using dry pigments, for the love of mike wear a good breathing mask. Those particles can lodge deep in your lungs, and enough of them are heavy metals to cause serious health problems.

This applies to chalk pastels as well.