Sergio Calvo Painting Workshop

Sergio Calvo is a Spanish figure painter who has recently made a cross-Canada tour, giving painting workshops utilizing his award-winning painting method. I, and several painters from Edmonton, drove down to Calgary last weekend to catch his 2-day class.

The workshop, held at the Ogre's Den, was well attended. 19 students for the weekend.

We all used this 75mm Conan figure from the Black Sun sculptor. All were primed black with a white frontal highlight.

Sergio's method was pretty straightforward. 5-layer brush painting. The odd part of his method was to then blow a shade filter onto the figure through an airbrush at very low psi. We were all wondering how this would work out as the workshop progressed...because we would not be able to see the impact of the technique until the very end of the class.

So, here is the figure with the first layer down. Again, this is brush-painted, which would not have been my choice if doing the figure myself. (I would have airbrushed on the first several layers.)

At the end of day one, 5 layers were brush-painted onto the skin. Leather and fur were tackled as well. The second day was for the face, metal and filter airbrushed layers.

By the end of the second day, we had run through all the techniques, but no one was able to finish their figure off. Regardless, we got the point of the workshop, which was brush painting first and finishing off with airbrush.

To be honest, I didn't like the technique...

...except on the cloth. Boy, did I like that. I had brush painted a base layer of dark red, and a mid-tone layer. Then I used Sergio's filter technique to spray dark green into the shadow areas, and hit the highlights with a bright red. Bingo. Solid gold. Strong tonal variation, and not a brush stroke to be seen.

Everyone seemed to enjoy the class, even if there were mixed reactions to the methodology.

Thanks for the class, Sergio!

'Til next time.