Painting with Plantie Tuesday! #2

Welcome back to Painting with Plantie ^^ This week I documented my journey of painting Swan Girls bent leg in my current painting. I have not to my recollection painted a bare knee realistically so this was a bit of a challenge for me too.
So! Lets see how I went about doing it :D

This is what I saw when I decided to start painting. Not much going on, just a basic coat.

Well, I first saw a problem, I had in my extreme sleepiness the night before decided to painted a large shade spot under her calf on her thigh without looking at the reference picture for guidance and thus saw later that that should actually be a light spot :P So! The first thing I did was correct my misjudgement.

This is my Winsor & Newton stay wet palette, with the 4 skin shades I had made up: a base light, yellowy, reddish, and purple

Since I am trying to use more skin colors in my work, I made it up much the same way as the rest of the painting - with those 4 types seen above. I use a stay wet type palette because I like having the same colors the next day since I work 8-5 in another town, its nice knowing when I come home theyll be ready to use again!

First off, map out the dark lines where the curves and such are.

Using a small dry brush from Games Workshop I use the yellow and red color to put in shading.

Note! Dry brushes - I use them all the time. The small ones I use like in this picture are from Games Workshop, which are made for painting Warhammer and other miniatures :P These are super cheap so they are a cheap way to go - but they wear out really fast. More on that later!

after adding basic shading with a small dry brush.

If you dry brush on paint and then keep going too hard without letting it dry properly, you get this ugly "hole" effect in the paint.

the "bid daddy" dry brush

 After I had struggled to put in the purple shades with the Games Workshop brush I noticed I had really worn it down my last 2 paintings and I needed a better alternative for the large leg.
So, I got out the big daddy dry brush. This one I made myself by chopping off the end of an old thicker brush to make a fat square shape. If you have brushes you can mutilate and make into dry brushes, go for it!!

after one coat of blending with the bigger dry brush, started getting alot closer to where i wanted, but still too purple.

The left is where I started, the right is where I ended up. One more coat of base color dry brushing over the purple and wa-la!

Swan Girl - Leg WIP done for now :P

All in all the process took me 2 hours with some mental breaks here and there :)
I found out - knee caps where very hard! And I will still want to work a bit on the shading but would like to wait to do the other leg to get a better perspective of what needs to be done.

I hope you all enjoy this edition of Painting with Plantie, have any comments, critiques, questions, just let me know! Thanks for stopping by :D