Another day, another exceptional Judgement sculpt which I got my sneaky mitts on early.
This beautiful lady is Istariel, the Mistress of the Flame, and elven badass in the game of Judgement. She is calling up fire swirling around her as she throws blasts of flame at her foes. Pretty sweet! Now this is the first time that I have really tried to replicate a piece of artwork, colour for colour, and I have to say that it is not easy. Here is the original character art for Istariel:
There is lots of nice colours in there, orange glow, the purple which contrasts with the yellow, silver reflecting the glow of the flame, and so on. One cool idea saw when I was researching OSL techniques was taking a photo of the model in the dark, with an actual flame. Here is the result of that attempt:
Good start.
Anyway, after undercoating with my airbrush with the Vallejo Surface Primer Grey, I then pulled out some different flesh colours to what I normally use, I pulled out the Scale 75 Fantasy Resurrection Flesh and whatever other one comes in that set that is paler... Harvester Flesh maybe?
I airbrushed a number of thin coats of the skin colour, then put the lighter shade through in a few areas also.
This gives me a nice smooth clean surface to work from. It is a model with lots of intricate detailing, but also a lot of great soft areas like skin. Part of making a model in this scale look good, is ensuring that those areas of large flat space are smooth, but the intricate details are picked out cleanly.
The next stage was to go in and add some shading to the skin. In this instance I wanted to use something a little colder than what I normally use, knowing that the model will be lit by the OSL glow from the wreathing flame, so I used a purple to glaze in some shadows, and then some Dark Sea Blue.
Often when you paint an area like this it can be hard to tell how much more contrast you need to achieve. Often you may already have enough, but without the other areas of colour blocked in it might not be apparent. At this stage I like to paint in roughly what the other colours will be to see how it all looks together.
You can immediately see how much brighter the skin looks, just from filling in those other areas.
I worked on lightening up the hair, and adding some shading and highlights to the purple.
One other big moment during the painting process is when you do the eyes. Because I like to use a lot of glazing and airbrush work, I don't often do the eyes until I call the skin finished mostly, but when you do them the model really can come alive. That was the case with her, she felt a bit lifeless and then I popped in her eyes and bang:
One of the challenges with this model was painting something that looked like the art, but still felt right to me in terms of the choices I was making for contrast and so on. I could see that the silver in the artwork would not work well with the chains and the breastplate, so I felt I needed to change it up to a dark colour, and the ubiquitious DSB was called up to the plate. I wanted to go there also because it recedes a lot, ties in with the skin tones, harmonising everything together.
It still was reminiscent of the art, but wasn't clashing as badly for me in terms of contrast. I was happy. Time to proceed to metallics now! I used the Scale 75 metallics range, shaded with the same colours as the skin, and some black, and then highlighted with VMA Steel. The downside to the Scale paints is they get a little thick, whereas the VMA is so thin but heavily pigmented, so its great for sharp edges and nicks.
Looking pretty good at this stage, and as you can see I started on the fire base. This is just airbrushed VMC Red Leather, then P3 Orange. It was a rough first coat to give me something to work from.
I went back in with the airbrush, started from white, then down through some yellows, orange, red and then even hints of purple on the very edges. It was all airbrush, and I didn't mask anything off as I wanted soft transitions. Just lots of thinned paint, low PSI and lots of passes. I also did exactly the same technique on Istariel herself from underneath with the airbrush, to start the OSL process.
Once that was all done, I glued her down to make sure the lighting was consistent in the areas I wanted it to be in, and started tweaking the overall appearance of the model. There was a few little changes I wanted to make, but the biggest one was the OSL consistency.
Once I finished that, I did a quick contrast check but taking a better photo than I normally take, just to make sure it was working the way I wanted it to.
You can see I haven't got the values perfect, the yellow one the base is actually basically the same as the head. Matching the art can be tricky. The other thing I noticed was the face needed a little more colour, and richness, so I added some blush to her cheek and bit more colour in her lips. I wanted her to look lit from below, which is why she has slightly bigger bags under her eyes than normal.
So, I completed the last few little things I wanted to do, and took proper photos for myself, and prepared to send away another little soldier off to battle.
You can find more photos of her here:
http://www.puttyandpaint.com/projects/12087
Feel free to shoot me a message here in the comments, on Twitter or Facebook if you have any questions about the scheme, or the paints used!
Trent
