Handpainted Props - Treasure Chest

A staple of dungeon crawling, the chest served as a nice practice of both wood AND metal textures. Very fancy!

Treasure Chest from kizz on Sketchfab.

I've taken to painting more of the texture on a single layer. Obviously this makes it a little harder to remedy mistakes (just lots of repainting) but it has steered me away from relying on layer effects and whatnot. Here you can see that most of the wood detail has been painted on the one layer, with the base metal colour on another.

Taking what I learnt from the sword texture I started painting in the values for the metal; a light blue fading to a murky green-blue. 

The highlights and shadows for the metal were painted as overlay and multiply layers, just so I could control just how light and dark they were by controling their opacity. However, I'm not a big fan of the result and so I think in future I would probably paint them in the good ol' fashioned way.

And so all that was left was painting in some details on the metal (because what's a chest without a lock?) and tweaking the colour so it would fit in better with the other props.

And so the chest is finished! I can already see vast improvments in my work (in both approach and final product) from when I started off this little exercise (sorry crate). I think I even have my own little twist on the painterly style, which is pretty neat!

The original design of the chest featured little legs which added a lot to the sillhouette but no matter what I tried I just couldn't get them to look right. As a result I removed them near the end of the study. Unfortunately that means there's a small chunk of the texture sheet which is unused on the actual model (in case you were wondering what that weird blob on the right was).

I think I need to work on my wood texture, still. Mostly in regards to detail, scratches and such. I think that would really make the texture pop a bit more and make it more visually interesting.

And I'm still not 100% sold on my metal texture either. I've been doing some looking into it and it seems that it's the highlights that really sell it as metal, so that's something I need to work on for sure.

But I honestly think I have the foundations down (I mean, that DEFINITELY looks like a treasure chest to me) so I think from here on out it's just a matter of working on these sorts of things whenever I get the chance. It's genuinely lovely to see improvment in my own work. I know I'm not quite Dinh-level but I think as long as I reflect on my work and try and tackle the issues I have with it I'll get there some day.