Luz, New York, Part 1

Chalking up the last of the models on the list for the Crystal Dragon.

Luz, New York, is a model that I saw and absolutely fell in love with.  In fact, the entire Malefic range from Nocturna is really intense, moody and very unique in the miniature field.  They have a really high quality casting process and the detail they capture is beautiful and really crisp.

I ordered the model ages ago (as per usual) and didn't really have any plans for it, but I wanted to paint it with a brighter palette.  I think the model that inspired me was this incredible piece by Sergey, Memories of the Void:

http://www.puttyandpaint.com/projects/11409

I was blown away by that model the first time I saw it.  Unbelievable smoothness and painting, colours are so vivid.  You can see where the 130 odd hours went.  Given I normally spend between 10 - 20 hours on a model, it is that amount of time on each small section.  Evidently I still have a long way to go!


I started off with no firm plan, as usual.  In fact, the first thing I did was start doing shit at random, like gluing a piece of plasticard down to a tube, gluing the piece of terrain she stands on to it, and painting on GW crackle texture paint on it.

I actually initally wanted to not have anything extra on the base, just the textured earth and the piece of brickwork but it looked really poor, so I started adding extra stuff, things that would suit a post apocalyptic world.

I gap filled and primed Luz, then went straight into the skin, painting her up and glazing on some layers of varnish and diluted paint to soften it out.

Again still making it up, but I think subconsciously inspired by the Sergey piece, I sprayed her torso in a mixture of Flat Red and Hull Red.

Once I'd painted that up a bit, I then masked off those areas, and painted her cloak in Dark Sea Blue, and black.  Now recently I've been avoiding using the airbrush for any real sort of painting, but I decided to use it here to just create a little bit of volume.

Then finally, I masked off everything and painted the upper cloak area with dark brown, trying to have it be a different colour to the other brown areas I had just painted.

So that got me to this stage:

All in all about four hours work, really happy with the colours so far.  The fun stuff begins now, where I start to really push the contrasts, highlight up those areas, paint in eyes and bring the model to life.

I am excited for this model, it is shaping up really nicely, and every stage so far has gone exactly as planned.


Cheers
Trent