Blonde Hair And Blue Eyes

Here's a step-by-step guide of how to paint blonde hair and eyes using the Countess Karnstein bust from Solarwind Productions. It's by no means a definitive guide, but you might find it useful as a starting point.

Hair Basecoat

Step 1. I'd already done most of the shading work on the flesh areas, but I'll not go into that here. it was easier to do this first and mask, than trying to mask the hair and then tackle the flesh. So to start, the hair is given a dark sand basecoat by hand.

Lowlights

Step 2. I masked her face with Maskol and added some lowlights and shadows, loosly airbrushed in with an olive green shade. Yes, green. I thought it sounded daft too, but several people on the Gremlins mailing list said this was the way to go, so I thought I'd give it a try!

Highlights

Step 3. Some highlights were then added, trying to keep the colour from getting too flat, and allowing some of the shadows to still show through.

Dark Wash

Step 4. A thin wash of dark brown is then applied. Whilst it's still wet, the excess is gently wiped off the raised areas with a clean piece of kitchen towel.

Finished

Step 5. Finally a couple of lighter shades are drybrushed gently over the raised areas. As an extra touch that works well with blonde hair, a very light drybrushing of interference gold is applied - this only shows up in direct light and adds a very natural sheen.

And that's all there is to it! So now onto her eyes...

Eyes Step 1

Step 1. The whites are filled in with a slightly off-white.

Eyes Step 3

Step 3. A dark shade of the main iris colour (slate blue here) is added, leaving a faint ring of the black showing round the outside.

Eyes Step 5

Step 5. Another star, this time light brown is added around the outside of where the pupil will go - this sounds odd, but have a look closely at someone with blue eyes and you'll see what I mean.

Eyes Step 2

Step 2. The irises are filled in with black. In this case the iris and pupil are sculpted in so there's no need to worry about the positioning too much.

Eyes Step 4

Step 4. A slightly irregular 'star' pattern is added to the iris in a lighter shade of blue to simulate the texture of the iris, and lighter still 'crescent' highlights are added either side of the pupil

Eyes Step 6

Step 6. Finally the pupils are filled in and a couple of white highlights are added to the top-right and bottom left of each iris.

When the rest of the face is completed, I'll add gloss to them with a couple of coats of Johnson's Kleer floor wax (aka Future). Because it's still hard to see exactly what I've done, I recreated the same steps below in PhotoShop on a much larger scale (and boy, it this so much easier!!).

You can see the finished piece in the Gallery.