Cat Girl Part 1

So after getting the Dragoon ready to paint, a new figure arrived at my front door.  A while ago I had pre-ordered a figure called Hailey Smith: Cat Suit from Wonderlands Project.  She's a limited edition (200 copies) 54mm figure.  I thought this would be a fun project and decided to start painting her first.

So far I've focused on the skin.  My typical process is to do the highlights and shadows and then go back over with glazes for added color variation.  What you see here is just the first part.  The glaze step is done after all of the parts touching the skin have been painted.  In this case, that's most of the rest of the figure.  So the shading on the skin (except for her legs) is more or less complete, but there's still depth and nuance that will be added with the glazes.

It's a nice sculpt to work with, but painting a female figure can be challenging.  I'm trying to have a good range in contrast, but still keep features soft and feminine.  One trick is to not over-emphasize secondary features with the shadows.

Other projects...

I haven't been posted here as frequently as I normally do.  That's partially because I've been sick (nothing series), but mostly because of real life tasks taking up precious painting time.  Of course, sometimes real life tasks and painting time end up being the same thing.  Although it's not mini-related, I thought I'd share a painting project I've just completed.  My wife and I are getting ready to welcome a new addition to our family in around a month.  I've been hard at work getting her room ready and did this one one of the walls...

The room has a Disney/Fairy Tale theme.  Although it was a bit of a bigger piece than I normally do, it was a lot of fun to add a personal touch to the room.

Meanwhile, on the small scale, I decided to start on a new project.  I'm still working on the mounted hussar, but I know that project is going to take me a while.  So I wanted to take a break and paint something a little quicker.  I decided to start on Pegaso's Officer of the Dragoons.  It's a pretty straightforward project (I've already painted a Dragoon, so don't need to put too much thought into my color mixes), so I'm hoping it will move along quickly.  One thing I did want to do with this figure was put into practice some of my takeways from Crystal Brush.  In this case it's the idea of working on the figure and the base simultaneously.  I feel like often my bases are a bit rushed, probably because I only start on them when the figure is all done.  This way I will hopefully give the base the time it deserves.

The first step was, of course, to actually build the base before painting the figure.  The figure is an officer in his dress uniform (fancy clothes), so he wouldn't be in the field or part of a battle.  Instead I decided to put him in front of a chateau.  I'd seen a fancy gate over at ScaleLink and thought this would be the perfect fit for this figure.  I built the pillar using Juweela bricks and then cut up the gate to make it fit.  The plaque on the pillar is from a set of name plates from Pk-pro.  I had a few other ideas, but in the end decided the didn't really add anything useful to the scene so I kept it simple.

Captain of the Hussars Part 3 and a bit of Miscellaneous

Well, things have been pretty quiet on this blog for the past few weeks.  I haven't made a lot of progress on the hussar, so there really wasn't much worth showing.  I've also been working on a few other painting-related things (including some boring old painting around the house).  I attended Kingdom-Con down in San Diego a few weeks ago.  It's mostly a gaming show, but this year the Draconic Awards ran a painting competition and organized a number of classes.  I didn't compete, but went down to socialize and ended up helping to judge the painting competition.  For this being just the first year of the painting comp, I was impressed at the number of entries.  Hopefully next year I'll go into it with a little more planning and hopefully teach a few classes there as well.

I've also been taking part in a number of hobby hangouts.  There's a new facebook group (started a month or two ago) called "The Hobby Hangout."  Basically it's a lot of people using Google Hangouts to chat/socialize while they paint and share what they're working on.  This past Friday I ran one and did a pseudo class on painting faces.  I used Google to record the hangout and it's up on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtCL3kKxNe0

The class part starts about a half hour into the video.  The resolution isn't great and the audio is a bit in and out.  I'd like to repeat the class, but record directly from my camera/computer rather than through the hangout.  That should create a video with much higher resolution (the camera should be in HD) and better audio too.  I'm not sure when I'll have time to do that, but I'll definitely post the end result here when I do!

Okay, back to the actual figure... it's been a bit slow going on the Hussar.  I wanted to do some freehand design work on his clothing.  Since it's gold lace, I decided to go with TMM for the details.  That ended up being a lot tougher than I thought.  Something about the metallic paint just made it tough to do really fine lines.  I struggled with it, but eventually got the hang of it (sort of).  You can see the results on the red part of his hat.  There will be more to do on his coat and pants, but that will wait until later.  His headgear is finally finished and I'm ready to move down to his coat.  I decided to set the figure on his horse for the photos, it's nice to see the whole piece.

I've got a couple other pieces primed and ready to go on my work bench.  The first is an angel figure from Milosh Miniatures.  Milosh is a painter who's been commissioning some sculpts and turning them into figures.  If you're interested in seeing more or ordering any, check out his facebook page.  I'm teaching a private painting class and this is the figure we'll be working on.  Lots of opportunity to work on painting skin!  Oh, and the figure is 54mm (though Milosh also created an 80mm version).

Also on the workbench is a 75mm scale sculpt of da Vinci's Vitruvian Man from Joaquin Palacios.  It's a little bit different, but I thought it was really cool to see one of da Vinci's sketches turned into a 3-D sculpt.  Not sure when I'll start this, but it's a good option to have around in case I get too frustrated and need a break from the Hussar!