The Witch Bust
This one was painted in under a month, which is reaallly fast for me. I love the sculpt, it has some funny details like small teeth, a snake, nicely sculpted hair. I’m quite happy how it turned out, for future self review let’s write what went good, and what could be improved…
The good
- expressivenes & illustrative style. This is what I like in minipainting, and I’m quite fond that this work further in that direction than before
- it does not copy any versions I’ve seen, the color composition was thought out before starting the work. I think there is a good balance between saturation & desaturated colors
- airbrush smoothing worked, again
- first time I’ve painted hair that look interesting
- brave textures in some places. I really like the chest piece weathered look.
- snake turned out quite all right. Organic sloppy painting suits organic textures well
The bad
- didn’t take any helpful pics during the paintjob. Grayscale pics would help with the lighting. Value is the same on both cold & light sides of the skin, and a grayscale pic would help to tackle that. I think it would be better with more agressive shades on dark side, together with a terminator line it would be more dramatic.
- Shade the belly button more
- didn’t write down exact recipes, which made it hard to fix mistakes after airbrush stage. This also made me blend the side of face without so much airbrush work and since I didn’t have so much patience it shows on closups. Structured approach to blending is required on higher lever works
- In general, go darker with shades and lower on highlights on skin on lower parts of the model to ephasise focal point (face) even further
- Subtler blacklining of hairline
The plan for next bust
- ref pics of all harder elements
- exact notes of colors
- put all base colors, plan the secondary light with airbrush. After that, refine
- more airbrush blending, better detail handling: prepare a more elaborate masking solution to help handling this
- prepare, read about all solutions before painting the element. I have the literature :)
Cheers!