Monday, June 24, 2019

Adventures in Contrast: White Marble


Welcome back to Adventures in Contrast, where I show you all sorts of little tricks and techniques
that you can do with Citadel Colour's Contrast paint system!

A few days ago I showed you how to paint green marble using Contrast from Citadel Colour. This time, I'll be taking what we learned there and applying it to do white marble instead.

This technique uses a few regular paints to get the proper effect, namely Rhinox Hide and White. But it is still all thanks to Contrast and how these new paints work.


The key to this technique is the translucent nature of Contrast paint, the randomness of using cling wrap to make the main marbling and the grain of a natural sponge to make our main veins of color to give use that trademark marble veining.

To do this, you'll need any brand of standard food storage cling wrap, I use Saran Wrap, but anything similar to it will work. You will also need a natural sponge, like those you would use to sponge walls with painting them. A synthetic sponge, such as a dish sponge or sponge from packaging will not work, because we need the structure of the natural sponge to give us our veining.

We will be using Apothecary White, Grey Seer and White to give us the main color.

Marble has a bit of a cloudy look to it, and to simulate that look we will be using Skeleton Horde and painting it in splotches on the surface. It will look very bad at first, especially once the Rhinox Hide is added to the surface, but that's OK. The white will tone down down a lot of it.

For the actual marbling, I use the new Grey Seer base paint and Cold White from Vallejo, but really any standard white should work well. Both of these paints will be hit with Saran Wrap to get our random veining.

To use the Saran Wrap, we lay the paint down and while it is still wet, crinkle up the wrap and dab it on the surface. This will lift paint of and leave whatever wasn't touched by wrapping. If there's still a lot of paint on the surface, dab it again with a different section of the wrapping to pull more off, as desired.

The last thing is using the sponge to add those classic marble veins. To use the natural sponge, wet it down and then squeeze it until no excess water comes out. Dab it into your paint and then on a dry towel to get excess paint off of it. Then it's just a matter of dabbing it onto your base/model/rock. The shape of the natural sponge will then lay down a nice looking pattern that replicates the look of  nice and fat marble veins.

This all comes together in the following steps:
Base: Apothecary White
To start off we will base coat the area with Apothecary White over Grey Seer primer. Put it on as heavy as you like.

Layer: Skeleton Horde
Next up, we will splotch some "clouds" of Skeleton Horde onto the area. Let it pool in some areas and let it stay thin in others.


Sponge: Grey Seer
Now take your natural sponge and sponge on some thin veins of Grey Seer. Let the sponge do its thing and be random.


Layer: Grey Seer
Now thin Grey Seer with some Lahmian Medium and layer it on the base. Take your cling wrap and crinkle it up and dab it onto the surface to pull the paint up.

Sponge: Rhinox Hide
Next take your sponge again and some Rhinox Hide and put some nice dark veins onto the surface.


Layer: Apothecary White
Cover the area with a thin layer of Apothecary White to tone down the darkness of the Skeleton Horde and Rhinox Hide.

Layer: Skeleton Horde
Layer on some smaller areas of Skeleton Horde "clouds", allowing it vary in coverage, but not making the clouds as large as the previous step.

Sponge: White
Next up, sponge on some White for large areas on bright white veining.

Layer: Grey Seer
Tone down the white with another cling wrap layer of Grey Seer.

Sponge: Grey Seer
Sponge on another layer of Grey Seer to add a bit more fat veining to the top.

Layer: Apothecary White
The last coloring step is to paint the entire area with Apothecary White and then dab it with cling wrap pull some of it off and give it some texture. 
Gloss: 'ardcoat
Last but certainly not least is to paint the area with gloss. Mix some 'ardcoat with lahmian medium and cover the whole area. If it is patchy, add more until it is an even glossy surface.


And that's it! White marble via Contrast. This is definitely the way I'll be doing white marble whenever I need to now. the finished product ends up looking great and it is super easy to do.

I am currently using both the green and white marble on a project and it looks great together! I'm super hyped on this technique at the moment.

Thanks for reading and hopefully this helps you with your own marble.

Until next time, you can catch me on Twitter and Instagram. Where I'll be sharing pictures of tests I am currently working on and you can ask me any questions you may have.

If you like what I do and want to support the site and my painting endeavors, you can do so over on Ko-fi. All it takes is $3 and it's much appreciated. Also, you can buy The Brush Wizard shirts and such over on my Teespring shop, where you'll find a growing selection of shirts and other goodies. 

Thanks for reading!