Templar: Armor and Sword

Finished off her boots. I decided they weren't in as bad a shape as I thought. Then I went on to her metal bits - the sword, some armor plates, buckles and such.

I think with the metals done she's come together reasonably nicely. Tomorrow I need to finish the wrappings on the sword and then do a bunch of touch up. You can see where I got blue on her left shoulder. :p

I also put a base coat on her base,

Next will be washes to bring out the crevasses, and glazes to put in some variety and depth and pull in some of the colors from the figure itself.

Templar: Base

Thanks to some member of our household barking to be let out in the middle of the night...twice...I slept quite poorly last night and was a bit too worn today to do fussy detail work on a competition piece. Still, I wanted to make some progress, so I turned to her base.

This is a slab of cork with a layer of Sandy Paste across the top, then a few smaller pieces of cork and some pebbles placed in the paste. The pebbles are pretty much the same color as the paste, so they don't show up very well right now. I'll paint this whole thing and put some sprigs of grass on as well.

When it's done, the base will go on top of a plinth, like this:

Ans she'll go on the base.

Templar: Boots & Such

Shaded and did a first round of highlights on her boots, belt, holster, and so on. The highlights still need a fair bit of work. They're in a chunky, ugly stage, and they'll also need to go a bit brighter.

Templar: Sash, boots

Deepened the shadows on her sash and put on highlights. Also base coated her boots and other leather bits. What's left will mostly be metal.

I think this is not going to be the best piece I've ever done, but it'll be alright.

Templar: Sash, Bra. Librarian: Hood.

So I put a base coat of a rusty red/orange on the librarian's hood. I've done this before shading and highlighting any of the other clothing because I want to make sure I like the color combination before I put a lot of effort into detailing it.

I don't use orange often, and the color is much brighter than anything else on the figure right now. Both the green and the purple are not as saturated. So, it's a color I'm not used to seeing, and it sticks out a lot against the rest. That adds up to me not being terribly comfortable with it. This is the kind of situation where I can't tell if I don't like it because it really isn't working, or if I don't like it because I'm not used to seeing it.

However, part of the point of practicing is to try new things and push boundaries, so I'm going to stick with it. I'm pretty sure that if I use the same color (the purple) in the shadows in all three, that will help tie it together.We shall see.

And for the templar. I shaded and highlighted the bra, and put another base coat along with a first round of shading on the sash.

There's a couple places on her skin that I'm going to have to come back and touch up or re-line, but I'm going to wait to do that until I'm done with the sash. There's a pretty good chance that in doing the sash I will slop a bit more. There are a few really hard to get to spots on this figure, like that bit on her left side between her arm and her body where the sash comes down. Pretty much I'm stuck with jamming some dark colored paint in there as carefully as I can to avoid hitting her arm or her waist, and hoping I get it all filled in.

Templar: Pants, Sash. Librarian: Coat

Continued with the highlights on the templar's pants. Finished the areas that I hadn't put any highlight on yet, and also put a lighter layer of highlights on. Looking at it, the pictures from yesterday were right. It wasn't light enough. So, I fought with the uncooperative paint some more. I spent a lot of time going back and forth, making the highlights wider, then narrower, then wider again, then lighter, then not so light, then lighter again...got to the point where continuing to futz with it was not helping. So I bailed and went on to base coating her bra and sash. I may go back to the pants if I think I can improve them.

That red really didn't cover well, so I'll probably put on at least one more coat.

Also put a base coat of olive green on the librarian's coat.

So far, I'm liking both these color schemes.

Templar: Pants

I shaded her pants and started the highlights. It took a long time, most of which I spent fighting with the paints I was using. The base color doesn't cover well. The darker brown I started shading with doesn't like to go on smoothly. The purple I put in to the deepest shadows went on nice, but that was the only one. The highlights, I had to glaze over a while lot to make them smooth. In the pictures the highlights don't look near light enough. In person they're more obvious.

Librarian: Glasses, skirt

I didn't spend a lot of time painting tonight, and I wasn't up for doing careful shading. So I switched to focus on the librarian for today. Her face had looked unfinished with the glasses not painted and that was bugging me, so I gave her some nice Matilda glasses.

Then I spent a while considering a color scheme for her. I decided pretty quickly that I wanted a khaki jacket and a red head scarf. I might put a camo pattern on the jacket, but probably not. Then the question was, what color to make the skirt/bodice? I went with a dark, de-saturated purple. I'll probably put the other colors on before I shade and highlight it just to make sure the combination is OK.

I did futz some more with the templar's hair, but I don't think it looks much different so I didn't get new pictures. I'll pick that up next time I work on her.

Templar & Librarian: Hair, pants.

Mostly worked on their hair tonight. The librarian was easy, since hers is mostly covered.

And the templar, which was a bunch more work.

Hair is not one of my favorite things to do. It's very fiddly, and I don't quite have it down yet...things like how broad to make the highlights. How to make them smooth enough and bright enough. I think I see a couple spots that need the transitions smoothed out a bit more.

Competition:Highlights and Hair

I though about it. I considered other hair colors. But she's a brunette. I also put highlights on her skin, and did her eyes and lips. I'm fairly pleased with the results, though I might go back to her lips and make them a bit more red. On the other hand, wandering the future wastelands does not leave lots of time for fussing with your makeup.

I am a little concerned about a mold line that's across the top of her hair. It's not really visible in these pictures. I cleaned it up as best I could, but it still doesn't look quite right.

Also, she's completely going to have leather pants.

Worked on the companion piece, too. Also brunette.

Competition: Shading Skin

I wanted to finish the skin on these two today, but didn't make it. Got the shading on, though.

Slopped my shadow colors around a bit on her, and had to fix it. Working on her, I'm pretty sure she won't be my show piece. The pose isn't as interesting, and I'm finding some tiny details about the sculpt that are non-optimal. Like, her breasts are kinda boxy...not an attractive look. Still going to keep working on it, though.

I'm reasonably happy with her so far, though figuring out the shadows was a little interesting. I'm also debating the color for her hair...she says brunette to me, but I'm better at blonde or auburn.

2!

I was going to work on competition pieces tonight, but a headache put the kibosh on that. I still wanted to get some painting in, so I finished off the spiders. There we are, ready to terrorize some dungeon delve somewhere.

And here they are with a person for scale. Lysette is not having a good day.

It's kinda sad at the beginning of the year when the counts are so very low. What? I only get to 2? Double digits at least would be nice...

Spider: Legs & Head

I worked on cleaning up the librarian some more, but she doesn't look very different so I didn't get pictures. I suspect she will not win the 'who's going to be my competition piece' battle, but I'll keep going with her for now.

I did want to clear some other things off my table, so I went back to the spiders and put blue highlights on their legs and head. They're pretty rough, but I'm fine with that as these are just intended for table top. The fangs and body will be bright green.

Hey, where have you been?

I know, I know. I put down words about painting more and posting more and promptly...didn't do that. Well, I have been painting, just commission stuff I can't post. But I'm done with that for now.

Since I posted last, I decided to go to Genghis Con in Denver in February. I've also been told that I Must Have a painting contest entry for the show, so I'm dropping everything to work on that. These are two two figures I'm considering. I'll see how it goes with each of them for a while before settling on one.

These are both Savage Worlds: Hell On Earth figures.

This is a librarian. I like the figure, but it's got a bit more trouble with mold lines and similar imperfections. I'll need to work on it a bit more to get those cleaned up if I'm going to use it for competition.

The other one is a templar. I think I did a little better cleaning her up.

Airbrush Interlude: Large Spiders

Pulled out my airbrush today, which has been neglected these last few months. I used it to put a base coat on a couple of Bones I large spiders. These will be for gaming quality.

Usually with natural(ish) creatures I like to work from images of actual critters as inspiration, if not as an actual target look. But most of the pictures I was finding for spiders were some variety of brown. Maybe black, but mostly brown. I didn't really feel like doing another batch of brown spiders, so I went with something not at all natural.

This is the same very dark blue I used on the Shadow. I'm going to highlight the legs and head in bright blue, and use bright green on the mandibles. I'll also blend in some bright green on the edges of the body plates there. I'd originally thought about doing that with the airbrush, but these guys aren't quite big enough for me to be able to do that. I might make those bright blue highlights pretty wide so the thing reads more as blue and less as black.

Also put a coat of brown paint on the base, cut out the slot, and glued the figure in to it.

She'll go on the back burner for now, since I've got other stuff farther along to get finished.

Lizardman: Skin (Hide?) base coat

Filled in his base coat, making it all nice and opaque. Even remembered the tail this time.

I also worked a bit on a base for another figure that I'll be starting soon. This is a square slotted base with a lip. I've filled it in with heavy gel with a little brown paint mixed in. The brown wasn't mixed in quite well enough, which is the white chunk in the middle. It's all going to be covered anyway. I'll paint the gel, then put some static grass on it to make it meadow-y.

I could probably have skipped filling the whole base in like this, and just put the grass on the well of the base itself. But then, since the base of the figure is smaller than that slot I'd have had to try to partly fill in the slot area. Here, I'll cut out just enough of the gel to fit the slot on the figure in, and the rest of it will be more or less even. Not quite even because the gel shrinks as it dries, but close enough.

Last Lizardman

Welcome to the new year! This year I'm going to try to paint more, finish more figures, and post more. On average in years past, I've gotten about 70 figures done rather than the paltry 40 of 2014.

So, here's my start. Just a base coat on my last lizard man. Except...I forgot his tail. :p Oh well. He needs another coat anyway.

Also, he's riding a lizard mount, so I've got that lizard too before these guys are actually all done.