Legionary Acrylic Painting

I did a drawing of this some time ago but never got around to painting it.  I wanted to gain some confidence painting some wildlife before trying to tackle anymore fantasy paintings.  Anyways, I modeled for this myself by putting my camera on a timer.

You can see in the reference photo that I wore clothes to simulate armor.  I used a side of a cardboard box for a large shield.

Here are the pencils but I think it is the last time I am going to render anything with graphite before doing a painting.  I find it is better to just do a line drawing, the pencil values are not as helpful as they should be.  Plus doing a full rendering is way too time consuming.  I'd rather spend one to two days on a drawing instead of 3 to 4 days.  Its just a waste of time when I can describe shapes and shadows with paint instead.

Anyways, as far as the painting was concerned, I had fun with it especially thinking about the color.  I knew I wanted to do a painting with green in the foreground.  The orange that you see is just the primary magenta reacting with primary yellow and/ or green gold.  Skin tone can sometimes be an issue for me but I ended up pulling it off.  There are a lot of opaques in this painting both in the foreground as well as the background.  The opaques in the background are mostly on the moons since I did not want to paint around them when I was doing my gradient washes.  All in all I think it is a successful piece, its a much different color theory than what I'm used to - there are almost no blues except for what is found in paynes grey.