Here is the finished Bilbo for the November Hobbit Painting Challenge of the One-Ring. I painted him in my traditional style of highlighting from black basecoat instead of the shade & highlight style I have used lately.

Working from a black undercoat gradually towards the lighter colours is very time-consuming, but also a sure technique to get good results. It requires precise brush control, but in a way it is also easy if you just add a very small amount of colour to the highlights, keeping them gradual. I mixed a dark base colour, for example for the trousers it was black and Scorched Brown, and then added some light colour from the other end of the colour series; beige in the case of the trouser example.

The tricky thing with this style of painting is that you don't necessarily get the exact mid-tone colour you expect. That is because you use a darker and lighter shade of the colour and the mix may be something a bit off the expected. It is also often somewhat muted because the dark and light shades contain more black and white. In the case of the more colourful clothes I used glazes to enhance and deepen the colour. For example the vest is Red Gore (a dark red) into which I have added Vomit Brown (a light orange brown) for highlights. The result was a somewhat muted red, which I brightened with a couple of Baal Red glazes (not washes).

By the way, this post is written with an iPad app called DraftCraft instead of Blogger's web browser interface. So, if there is something wrong with this post, you can blame the app... :-)