Emperors Champion, finished.

Click for flickr. See if you can spot all the dust on my sensor.

 So, here he is. The Emperors Champion! I wouldn't say I've spent enough time on him. But really... there is just a time when all your patience is spent and you just want to do something entirely different. Like getting wasted on alcohol instead of acrylics...

The mushroom thing that's been going on? The word champion is quite close to the swedish word for mushroom, champinjon. So it's been the standing "joke". Not that it was especially funny, apart from finding new words for all the post headlines.

First time I've tried out working with non metallic metallics. I can't say I'm especially fond of it. It looks good from one certain angle. The illusion is really there. And then you move your head and it looks kinda weird. Almost like when you take off your glasses while watching a 3D-movie.

All in all I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. The model in itself is awesome, and there are no dead spaces you need to "hide" or anything like that. It's just "paint". The exercise in painting black was especially fun, if you find frustrating to be fun.

Originally I had a pretty blueish black, so when highlighting that I added more blue. The problem was that the blue I chose was pretty cold, so when the final highlights came on it looked really really off since the cold hue made the illusion that it was further back.

Color theory 101

The warmer highlight kinda pops out more than the blue (cooler) highlight. Even though the cool tone is lighter than the warm one the illusion of it being lighter is kinda diminished. Something I – with I don't know how many hours of color theory classes – really should've thought of. But when the urge to paint grabs you, you just go with the flow!

I'm gonna hit it with some matt varnish later today (especially on the base). So if you spot anything you think I should correct, now is the time to do it. I'll go and submit it tomorrow!

Emperors Boletus, WIP #3

I'm getting to the end of mushrooms to use in the headline. Thankfully I'm at the end of the Emperors Champion as well. Yesterday was a frantic base-painting & -building session. Pigments, oils, weird solvents, and it all ended up with me doing some old school drybrushing and washing. It's just so damn hard to get proper contrast with pigments alone. No matter that it's more "realistic".

The Vallejo washes acted up as well, leaving weird residue when dry. So they're now officially on my shit-list. I've added plain distilled water to them instead of the regular gunk I use (Liquitex Flow Aid + 95% distilled water) when thinning. No difference. I've even gone so far as to add two agitator balls to the bottles just to make sure that they're mixed properly. No luck. Back to home made ones and GW-washes.

So anyhow, the champion... Still some stuff I have to fix. The buckle on the front is on top of the prio-list now. The blending is just not as smooth and it got kinda grainy >_< Tomorrow perhaps, I'm all exhausted after re-painting the sword like a 100 times.

The pipes are gonna get some green gunk flowing out of them. I'm slowly slowly building up the "flow" with water effects. It wont cure faster with the use of a hair dryer... bummer.