I base-coated the cowl section and the hair to help frame the face.

I will go back later and hand-paint the black inside the emblem.

I took the Andre Yellow paint set No. 2 and No. 3 to get the desired yellow shade and I airbrushed it onto the bat emblem area.

More base-coating…

Here, I am base-coating the cowl using gray graphene and flat black.

I do this to help me see if what I have done is to my liking, or if there are things I need to correct or adjust. For example, this is when I realized that the eyes were too bright, and I corrected them later.

I primed the whole figure in my usual go-to of Tamiya sky gray (XF-19).

I was able to get ahold of a limited-edition 1/4 scale Alter Ego bust of Batman, produced by Paul Gill of Gillman Productions.

The bust is a three-part resin casting. Due to the large size of this model, I painted with both an airbrush and paintbrushes.

I used Vallejo paints unless otherwise noted.

Click on the photos to enlarge them.

In the November 2020 issue, Joe Hudson painted the face of Michael Keaton as Batman using airbrushing and hand-painting techniques. Here, he shows you how to paint the Caped Crusader’s sleek black cape and bat emblem.

See how much darker one side is?

The next thing I did was spray flat black on the left side (the figure’s right side) because this side would be more in the shadows.

Here’s a view of the back side.

I lightly airbrushed the same base coat and then added magenta (from Kimera Kolors paints from Scale 75) to the shadows, also using my airbrush.

I continued to add more gray graphene to the basecoat and airbrushed more and more light layers over the highlighted areas.

How do you like it?

Batman’s left profile…

Batman’s right profile.

I used my brush and pure gray graphene to edge the broken areas from the cowl.

I finished painting the Batman emblem using Scale 75 flat black.

For the cape, I brush-painted a mixture of flat black and gray graphene, keeping it on the darker side.

Here is the result.

Back to my airbrush, I added highlights to the areas on the top sections of the cape with more gray graphene.

I added pure flat black and a touch of purple to some of the shadow areas, between the folds of the cape.

Looking at the cape, I thought it lacked some “life”, so I airbrushed thin coats of Andrea blue paint set No.2 to the top sections of the cape.

There! That’s what I was looking for. The Caped Crusader is now ready to fight crime in the streets of Gotham.