A thing a week 2020, week 37

This week we have something fun.  I've been talkingwriting about a large project going on in the background for several weeks and it's finally complete.  I started way back in early May and this marks several firsts for me.  This is the first time I've worked in assemblies and pins, the first time I've painted marble, the first time I've used an oil wash, and would have been the first time I completed NMM if it weren't for Shadoweyes a few weeks ago but it's the finishing that counts.

It all started with a lot of prep and a couple of Whitemane Duelists from Wrath of Kings.  The mold lines on these particular figs were pretty awful and in some places there were defects that would eventually get a Green Stuff makeover.  As an example of how awful the mold lines are, both have mold lines going over their faces and there was a really bad one over one of their eyes.  Seriously, CMON, you can do better than that.  I have multiples of this set and at some point will buy more so hopefully other lots won't be quite so bad.

After many hours of scraping mold lines, I thought I'd done OK but I was wrong!  After priming it became super clear that I had a lot more work to do.  Priming was the typical zenithal highlighting that I did at that point.  These days I would have done an anti-zenithal of something from beneath; probably a reflection of the floor color.  In retrospect, I should have started with the Green Stuff instead of waiting till final assembly and probably more of the mold lines needed to be scraped off rather than having so many layers of gloss varnish over the top.

I'd started mounting them on corks glued to big chunks of foam but I got extra tired of the foam so ended up pulling them off and using 123 blocks to keep them upright.  That got old too, so eventually the corks got glued to the top of 1" rods as discussed way back in week 33.  In retrospect, all of this was obvious and I probably should have been smarter about it, a statement that echoes through this project.  The wine corks I've saved have been glued to 1" bases for this purpose moving forward and I've learned that Scotch corks can be used for the same purpose and have a built-in base already.  As I have a lot of empty Scotch bottles around (don't ask), I've now got a pile of these I can work with and yet another reason to drink a lot of Scotch--not that I need one.

I started with a shaded basecoat which is basically "get paint in roughly the right colors all over the model" and started blocking out the NMM.  This started with Pro Acryl clears and eventually moved on to other Pro Acryl colors.  If I haven't saidtyped it before, I'll saytype it now:  Pro Acryl are by far my favorite acrylic paints.  I'd wanted to have a different blue for their cloaks and shirts so went with the super saturated clear blue that I like so much but over the course of painting, I realized this was all one piece and should probably be the same color.  In the end, their pants, shirts, and cloaks ended up being the same colors even though they all started differently.  I think they're better for it as they have a more unified scheme but I painted most of these figs twice--a good indication that I should plan long projects better.

The NMM on the neutral posed gal worked out OK.  The desaturated highlight on her leg plates sells the shininess even if my darks aren't low enough.  The same part of the more dynamically posed fig is a mess.  I didn't want to put the highlight in the same place for...reasons.  I'd stated with them on the other side and re-painted them on the side they're on now.  In my head, she stands off to the other fig's right so the highlights line up like in the glamour shot at the bottom.  In actuality, it just looks wrong. This was not helped by initially botching her sword arm's armor.  I thought I knew how it was oriented but it doesn't actually orient that way and I didn't realize this until final assembly.  In fact, I think her arm isn't glued on properly because the sword point shouldn't be intersecting the standing plane.  I fixed this after the fact but it caused me much grief.

These figs are supposed to have white hair and they have a luxurious amount of it.  For folks who don't paint, white is an awful color to work with.  On top of often being chalky, you can't really highlight it since you're already at the brightest brights.  I went with a warm grey at a lighter shade than their fur and worked up from there.  About halfway through I hit them with a thinned down medium grey wash to bring the shadows down a bit.  Their size and the length of their flowing locks meant a lot of very long brush strokes--something I'm lousy at and I'm not sure their hair turned out very well.  I also missed out on the "Pantene Shine" highlights because they're already so bright.  I suppose I could have worked more lowlights in there but by that point I'd already hit serious fatigue for this project.  Next time around I'll pick a different, more dynamic hair color, and probably paint them in oils.

There are three major flaws in these two figures which I leave out of a) laziness, and b) a stark reminder that I need to be more careful.  First, the NMM on both figures sells but not super well.  The dynamically posed figure in particular would have been better with a higher-angle highlight rather than the lower off-to-the-left one I used.  This is especially true for their swords which are way too long to suffice with a single light to dark transition and the down sides don't sell the green marble reflection.  The last is the relative un-shininess of the bronze pieces.  As that was one of the last bits to be painted, I was seriously out of gas despite only working on these gals earlier in the day when I had more energy.  There are for sure other errors like my inattention to blending and the super-heavy buildup of paint texture, but those three are the big ones that stand out to me.

Overall, this was a huge learning experience and I'll do it again sometime in the medium term.  NMM is a lot less scary now than it was when I started and I'm taking the first steps down the path of understanding.  These took more blending than I'd ever done in acrylics and while I don't think I did well in that regard, I did better than my previous best attempts and feel like I'll get closer to the mark on the next serious attempt.  I love these figs despite their completely impractical armor and terrible boob plate--I can't help myself.  Despite the many mistakes and difficulties I'm satisfied with where they ended up.  They were done to the tune of about 50 hours for both which seems like a lot less effort than I actually put in.

2020 finished mini counter:  90/50, 7/5 at high quality 3/1 serious attempts at NMM