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I've been working on my Hawk Lords Captain. I decided on doing a large Hawk Lords Emblem on his cape to take up all that room. it's turned out well so far, any advice on making the Hawk look better? I just finished his face, I'm not finished with him yet, so quick replies would be appreciated, i'd like to finish him up today or tomorrow. Thanks Dakka!

Looks pretty neat and tidy!

What you need to do is add some shading to the white areas so they flow with the rest of the cloak; makes the whole thing look more natural

When i do free-hand work, i always shade and highlight the base area completely before i start putting things over the top of it. There are two reasons for doing it this way:

1) It's much easier to see where the high/low lights are on the cape so you can shade your free-hand design more accurately.

2) As any free-hand work will almost always be much more detailed than the surface it's being painted on, you really don't want to be painting near the edges of your design; even a slight slip can leave you needing to re-touch a good hour or so's work :S Not fun.

Here is a pic of the back of St.Celestine's cape, which was painted using the method above

OMG! that's an amazing cape! my issue is trying to shade black! i can't seem to shade it without it either looking like i didn't do anything, or it makes the cape look grey! How do i realistically shade back like you did the turquoise on this?

Black is a tricky one to do properly, your best bet is to look at how a piece of black material behaves IRL. Notice how the recesses are much darker than the rest of the material? You need to very gently shade the upraised areas with very dark grey then add some very sparing lighter highlights on the highest points. Remember that you want to keep the overall effect of a black piece of cloth so don't go crazy with the highlights.

Black and White are imho the hardest colours to shade realistically :S

agreed! It's always to dark or too light, or the highlight colors are too different..... ugh it's so exasperating