Airbrushing and hand-painting the cowl and cape on this 1/4 scale bust of the Caped Crusader
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.
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.
I primed the whole figure in my usual go-to of Tamiya sky gray (XF-19).
Here’s a view of the back side.
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.
See how much darker one side is?
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.
I will go back later and hand-paint the black inside the emblem.
I base-coated the cowl section and the hair to help frame the face.
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.
Here, I am base-coating the cowl using gray graphene and flat black.
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.
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.
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.