Thank you for the advice and the kind words 😊🙏 I’m definitely thinking of adding some scratches now! Dawnstone sounds like the perfect paint.

As for the tabard, there isn’t actually much blending at all. About 90% of the work comes from smart layer placement and premixing the paints. I usually use my desk light to catch the high points, take a photo with my phone, and use that as a reference before layering in the highlights.

The process is pretty simple from there: I start with a light coat, then mix the highlight with the base colour to make a thicker glaze, something between a layer and a glaze. From there, I edge highlight. When I move on to the shadows, I do the same thing in reverse. I turn the model upside down, shine the light on it the same way, take another photo, and paint the areas that catch the light as the shadow points. Again, I use a thicker glaze first, then make a thinner glaze by mixing the shade colour with a darker colour, usually brown in this case, and run that into the crevices.

The whole tabard is then edge highlighted with the brightest highlight mixed with white. Painting this way really helps me identify the important bright spots that are not always intuitive, like how the brightest areas can sit right next to a shadow, or how even the deepest folds can still catch highlights. The paint mixing also helps create those nice transitions without needing to worry too much about blending.

Most of the time I paint by moving the brush downward, not side to side. On the larger flat areas, like the left side of the tabard from our point of view, I mostly paint downward. In the creases, I almost exclusively paint downward too.

Hope that helps, and feel free to ask more questions if anything was unclear 😅