A thing a week 2024, week 22

Continuing on last week's post, we have another pair of Rocky figs from Bones 4. They mostly follow the same scheme as the previous blue Rocky: one or more lousy ink basecoats applied badly with the airbrush followed by one or two more basecoats with contrast paints, speed paints, or homemade washes, followed by picking out every scale individually and finishing details like horns, eyes, and whatnot. And yes, I said last week that I wouldn't commit to picking out every individual scale on every fig but spoiler: I did.

First up we have Treasure Rocky in green and yes, greedy green was the only appropriate color choice. I didn't wan the chest and treasure pile to be the focus so I made sure they were muted down. The gold basecoat was a speed paint metallic IIRC followed by a seraphim sepia wash to darken it down and to knock out some of the shine. If it looks a little dark, that's why and exactly what I intended. There's still some shine in the darkest parts of his body which looks pretty wrong in the photos but sells a little better in person. I should have yellow-shifted his wings and ear webbing which is pretty consistent in all of these guys. The gems and whatnot are phoned in but I'm not unhappy with the result.

Next up we have Flying Rocky in red and I like to think that he was rudely awakened by an alarm or something and has taken flight in shock. This kind of thing happens when you spend hours picking out tiny details on a fig. Of the five, this guy is probably the weakest. There's a bunch of mold lines I didn't manage well and the shininess on him is a little distracting in person. I also failed to sufficiently pop out the scales under his eyes and all of that is on top of the difficulties I and many folks have in highlighting red. The problem is that when you push up into the lighter values it turns pink which reads incorrectly and I am not good at yellowing down into orange and salmon tones despite how much I paint in that color. Part of it is that I really don't want to lose the vibrancy of my favorite pyrrole red and it really shows on this guy since the composition is dominated by it. Yellowing down his webbing would have helped the contrast but I'm still happy to call both of these guys high quality works on the year.

2024 finished mini counter: 126/208, 9/12 high quality