Watch 'em Burn - Young Miniatures - US 101st Airborne 506 PIR Noville 1944

Finally completed the painting on this little gem of a sculpt from Young Miniatures. It was an immensely enjoyable project to experiment with some new approaches in particular emulating Masami Onishi's (大西將美) painting style from the 1970's. Onishi was a master in using very bold colors like violets, blue-greens, orange and magenta directly on his military illustrations during that time. A good example would be Onishi's box art painting for Tamiya's Panzer Grenadier Set and the US Gun and Mortar Team. The use of such vivid colors to illustrate dramatic lighting and the loose handling of the paint, helps to set off a much stronger mood and emotion - like in an old school movie poster/bill board. 

In conclusion, I personally feel that busts can provide any painter an excellent canvas to not just practice on the painting technique but also experiment on various painting styles and techniques. 

Going back to some 1/35 scale stuff now....

Cheers,

Calvin

Watch 'em Burn - Young Miniatures - US 101st Airborne 506 PIR Noville 1944

Though I am still in the midst of refining the tonal transitions and capping on some of the finer details, I would like to share some of my notes on how to create a "vibrating" effect with the light. Several years ago I when I was teaching vision biology from this text book by Margret Livingstone, titled Art and Vision, I encountered this topic on how equiluminent colors can create a vibrating effect on the eyes. It seems that the human visual cortex relays visual information to the higher order visual areas via two streams: the "Where" stream and the "What" stream. The "Where" stream is much faster, color blind and has high contrast sensitivity. The "What" stream is slower, color selective, high acuity and low contrast sensitivity.

In the case of equiluminant colors, though both of these colors are different in hue, they share the same level of brightness. This combination makes them are visible to the "What" stream but invisible to the "Where" stream. This creates an imbalance stimulus to the brain and therefore arousing this  visual phenomenon.

In the example above, notice that the text is legible in color mode but disappears when color information is discarded.

A little more than a hundred years ago, some impressionist painters like Monet were consciously employing equiluminant colors. Take for example in this painting titled Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight in the Fog from 1903 was rendered using an equiluminant complementary color scheme. The sunlight and reflection appears to be radiating because their color values are equal and therefore creates this vibrating effect.

Taking a cue from the impressionist masters, I tried to employ the same concept to rendering the flaming light on the paratrooper.

I hope that you will find my color notes useful. If time permits I will try to do a line up of the colors I used for this palette.

Cheers,

Calvin

Watch 'em Burn! US 101st Airborne, 506 PIR, Ardennes, Noville, 1944

Here is another lighting study of fire using this highly popular bust of this US 101st Airborne paratrooper from Young Miniatures. The inspiration for this piece is based on the defense of the Belgian town of Noville by the 1st Battalion of 506 PIR against the tanks of the 2nd SS Panzer Division "Das Reich". I decided on a narrative of a bazooka gunner, who had moments before dispensed a rocket onto an oncoming enemy tank and is now watching its demise.

The use of colors will therefore play an important role in conveying the emotion of that exact moment. To accomplish this, I utilized a complementary color scheme of red and green to establish color contrast and mediated these two opposing colors with tertiary tones of brown, ocher, orange, violet and magenta. I also incorporated two opposing light sources; the fire and cool white light. This allows me to play with the color temperature for added contrast and tonal variety. For example, I used Vallejo Black green for the warmer zones near the fire and Jo Sonja Phthalo Green for the cooler zones under the white light.

The challenge is to force the viewer to accept the orange/reddish tones as fire; maintaining the illusion that the light is emanating from an external source. It is still work in progress at this point -with several areas needing refinements. So until the next time, keep safe.

Calvin