Icarus: Step 17
So here we go, continuing on with the fleshy parts of the figure. I already had to start on the neck, as I explained in the last step, in order to finish the face without our fine gentleman looking as though he were the guest of honor at a prosthetic beard convention. The hair was chopped in, but unfinished as well.
Since it was necessary to begin work on the neck, it makes sense to continue with and finish the neck. And since the “neck bone’s connected to the.(everyone feel free to sing along) chest bone”, I decide to polish off the torso as my next order of business–and I really do mean that in the least Jeffrey Dahmer-esque way possible.
SHAZAM! Ok, the torso is now done. But I’d like to mention a couple of things on the topics of white skin and body hair before we continue:
First of all, yes, I do realize it’s a bit inconsistent to have a pearly-skinned youth running around in classical Greece. And no, I’m not implying that Icarus just got off the Greyhound longboat express from Scandinavia before his famous flight. However, since bronze skin is commonly associated with manliness, and by association experience, wisdom, etc., I’m opting for a fair-skinned Icarus to give him an element of youthful innocence to counter the already manly element of the beard. That is not to say that his overall demeanor is going to come off as “youthful” or “innocent” in the end, but it will go a long way to take that romance-novel-cover-model edge off of him, which sounds like peaches to me.
Second, it is perhaps worth mentioning that, although body hair is a natural phenomenon, it doesn’t translate so well to paint. In fact, it can look downright weird if you truthfully represent your model’s chest or armpits in all their Sasquatchian splendor. It is for this reason that I’ve chosen to set my brush to the epilator setting while completing the figure’s torso.
The hair is finished off with relative ease, once the general flow and form has already been established, as it was in the last step. Painting black hair is actually very simple. You only need two colors for black hair: pure black, and a lighter color, which can be any number of hues depending on what kind of highlights you want. That’s pretty much it. So once the general flow of the hair is established with the initial chop, all that’s left is to put in the highlights, do some blending, and then go back and dress the whole mop up by adding a few loose hairs here and there with a fine liner brush.
