Busy Day

I started a bunch of projects today, which means I'll probably end up with all of them taking way too long to finish. Though, I did make some progress on previously started stuff, too.

First, I spent some time with the air brush. Put a base coat on these rat swarms:

And started a Bones dragon. Things went down hill fast here. I did the middle chest and belly plates first, and then tried covering them with painter's tape when I did the main body. Not so successful - the tape didn't want to stick and I couldn't get it to sit along the edges as sharply as I wanted. Eventually I just ditched the tape and will plan on painting the middle bits in by hand when the rest is done. If you want sharp lines, the airbrush is just not the right tool.

So, it's going to be a red dragon. I gave it a base coat of dark, saturated blue, hoping that when I subsequently went over it with red in a lighter coat, the red would not get into the crevasses, and leave my shadows showing there. Oh, the membranes, like the wings, are just supposed to be red - no blue undercoat. My results here were mixed. The blue went on just fine. Once I got to the red, the airbrush kept clogging on me. I'm not sure if it's because I'd been using it for a while or if it's because it's an older bottle of paint. It's thicker, and may have had some chunky bits. There were definitely solid flakes that were making the airbrush clog. So, I quit with the red before I was actually finished. I'm not sure if I can get the effect I want with the blue sticking in the cracks or not.I did the same thing on the front edges of the wings, and they don't seem to show blue the way I was hoping. Still, I'm going to get another bottle of red that will hopefully not be so cloggy and see what happens with that. Which means it'll be at least a few days before I get back to him.

Then I did some sculpting. I'm making another practice dummy, and did the sticks today. I don't like them as much as the last set. They're too thick and kind of lumpy. I'll finish this out anyway...that's why it's 'practice'.

Then I threw a couple of rounds of brown was on the rats. This is going to be wash, dry brush, pick out details, done.

Started Lysette, another Bones. This is for the Reaper forum where someone started an impromptu 'beauty pageant' for this mini. I'm going to give her the same skin and hair tones I've been using on the vestals because...well, those paints are already out on my table. Then she'll probably get a green dress.

And last, I finally got back to the lizard men. I put some shading on their skin. It's kinda of chunky, so I may have to go back and do a bit of smoothing. We'll see...these guys are going to be a pain, and I'm not sure how much effort I want to spend on them. I'll have to do a closeup next time; it's hard to see the detail in the group shot.