Painting a pile of Skulls

skulls_1 — The very first step of painting anything is a little thought and vision of what, where and how you want to do it. Planning is the one thing that will determine how smoothly it will go. Although I sometimes completely freehand something,, there is very few times I do not at least plan it out in my head.

Step 1: Using these airbrush stencils I made, I sort them out and decide what is the best layout for my piles.

Step 2: Here I grab a Master Airbrush G44 and spray around the layout of skulls using a deep black paint. I spray the eye sockets, the teeth and the craniums.

Step 3: Next, using a more transparent deep black, I can start adding the details of each skull. I want each one to be as detailed as possible, so I take my time with each skull, making sure that the cheek bones, eye sockets and teeth are rendered completely before moving on to the next.

Step 4: Here, I am just taking the time to make each one look wicked and as real as I can. Note……some bullet holes and cranium cracks are added free hand to “spice” up the skulls. If you are a novice at painting skulls, this is a very good exercise to get used to them. They are super fun to paint and don’t require much to make them look pretty (as they are already dead.)

Step 5: Note the size of these skulls compared to my hand. The larger, the easier.

Step 6: When the skulls look ok to move on to color, I add little touches to the skulls such as definition on the teeth, cranium cracks, cracks in the ground, Smoke around the pile and even drop shadows indicating that the skulls are floating. Little details that will add a lot of cool effects to the final piece.

Step 7: Though dead, I want these skulls to look alive. The fire in the eyes were put in by dropping a dot of white with the other end of a paint brush.

Step 8: When you do your skulls, you can leave them black and white, color them bright colors or do whatever you would like to. Here I am using colors to make them look more realistic with the yellows and browns. I like them to be fairly tinted and not really fully colored in to give them some life. We can call this done at this point and I want to thank you for joining in on painting this pile of skulls.

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Artist tool box: ABD KIT-G44T-MASTER ABD KIT-G44T-MASTER