Lady Mechanika Part 1

I've hit a block on the Hussar bust.  I moved on to the black uniform and it's been giving me a lot of difficulty, so I decided to take a break and work on something else for awhile.  I've been meaning to start on one of the steampunk figures from Scale75, so I figured now was the time.  I'm working on Jessica Thunderhawk, however the sculpt is based on a piece of art for Lady Mechanika so that is how I'm planning to paint her.  Lady Mechanika is the main character in a steampunk comic.  The box art for the figure followed the original artwork exactly... so I felt like I needed to do something different.  I used some of the other artwork associated with Lady Mechanika and here is what I came up with, just a quick base coat and color sketch.

And here she is with a little more work on her.  I spent about 1 or 2 hours cleaning up the stripes on her pants (though they will obviously get more work when I start to shade and highlight them).  I also went to work on the skin.  The approach for female skin is a bit different from male skin.  While you can still have high contrast, you generally want softer transitions and to downplay the more minor features.  So the lines from the nose down to the corners of the mouth are subtle and lines under the eyes aren't brought out at all.  The darker you make features like those, the more masculine the face will look.