Work-in-progress

I evened out that stark highlight I had in the mid-section. Watered some codex grey and fixed that up. Patience, and solid brushwork were needed – you have to push the pigment where you want it to be while it floats in the water.

Lamenters Yellow continues to be a great colour for me. I put it over the red to make an orangey-fiery thing. Some of the scales (left of the first photo) they are really dark and not fiery at all. Added some watered Mephiston, some watered Ushapti Bone, more Lamenters, and lastly really watered down some chaos black and painted that in between the scales. That’ll give them more “pop”! 🙂

I think the moment I started to feel better about the model was after I painted the bone. I had started to do the glazing thing again, and it wasn’t working and was creating another horrible patchy mess when I decided to screw it. Layered highlighting had gotten me this far in life, and I wasn’t going to put it down yet. Moments after I started, I felt some of the tension leave my shoulders. When I was done, the model had the sort of characteristic brightness that I like in my models. It was that simple – a few simple spot colours cleaned up and instantly it looked much better.

A bit of work here and there on the ropes, some more cleaning up and that’s where I got to tonight.

Only two more things need doing here — the metal bits, and for me to accept that it’s a good paint job. I could feel something resembling obsessive perfectionism sneaking in today while I worked the skin back and forth trying to reduce the chalkiness. Perfect is the enemy of done, and of good enough.

After that, I glue this sucker to his base. Pretty excited about that!

This one is actual glazing. The light is Fortress Grey, the dark is Codex Grey mixed with P3 Umbral Umber and some Chaos Black. (All mixed with the matte medium and lots of water). The Umbral brings some warmer (“red”) tones in certain places while the rest of the skin is very cool (“blue”), which gives some tonal variation in the skin.

After the fiasco the other day, I found some foam and blue-tac and now I don’t handle my model anymore.

I don’t like the belly section on this side. It’s too stark, but every time I try to fix it I end up to stark in the other direction. I think I need to take a mid-tone and even out the muscle shading a bit.

But you can see that the horrible chaos of the last post has been fixed. There is still some mottling in places, but this is good since it’s a dinosaur skin. Painting on the layers of light and dark has given a certain amount of order to the chaos, so it no longer looks like the dogs breakfast.

The other thing I’m trying, is a bit of OSL, (Mr. Wappel) which is why there is some orange and yellow on the underside of the model. Can’t say I’m succeeding, but it should be good enough when I’m done.

That’s the biggest part of the model done, and because it’s a simple model there is really only 4 more colours to paint – gold, the scales, the ropes and the bone. I think I’m going to try to finish this part this weekend and glue it to the base so I can stop calling it my Stealth Suit Stegadon…

Glaze is in quotes because this isn’t glazing…well, maybe it is, but it’s not what people usually mean when they say glaze. I’m feeling like this is really part of the base coat of the model. I’ve painted some bright colours on, and now I’m darkening them a bit.

I took 1:1 Chaos Black and Matte Medium, added a boat-load of water, and wazzed that all over the entire damn model.

Still watching (listening to…) The Voice. Doesn’t make for good painting, even if it’s an easy job.

It actually looks much much worse than the photo makes it seem. The paint has dried in a patchy, horrible way. If you click on the photo and open a bigger version, you can see what I mean on the back leg.

There are a few spots where, while I was painting after working out last time, the paint isn’t adhering to the model. Oils from your fingers slide onto the model, and because our paint is acrylic/water based, it does what oil and water do and doesn’t stick. One spot was so bad I asked my club mates for advice and it was recommended that I sand it down. I did and that fixed the problem, but there’s a few more smaller ones to fix.

Right now, I’m a few posts behind. This is good because I can say that despite how embarrassed I am to post a photo of this model, it’s turning out ok tonight (which will be posted…in the near future. :))