Mounted German soldier

I'd have gone less for a bay color and more of a deep brown, burnt umber, for example,  but who's to say?

In the first picture, iyou need ot do a good deal of clean up. The joint between the neck and torso will need a lot of putty. There also appear to be some glue wspluges on the horse's right shoulder. It looks like there's still a seam down the middle of the haunch behind the saddle. You mauy be able to hide if there's tack to lay over it, but filling and sanding them is still your best bet.

I'm going to redo the horse, it didn't look as bad in real life.

Here's the German

He is going to have a lot of packs on his back so I decided not to fill the gap on his legs.

Woah!!! Looking great Will, I really like the camo uniform, good luck fixing up that horse, the flesh looks a little monotone at the moment, just try and get a wash with a darker flesh color, don't have to paint the actual shadows, but a wash might work.

Also the good thing about oils is it gives you a lot of time to blend, so if you get some light flesh and some dark flesh, paint the basecoat on then paint the darker color and while they're both wet- get a second (or third?) brush with no paint, no thinner, just clean- and then use it to blend the two gradually.

I redid him in acrylic because I smudged the oil (didn't know it took more than 8 hours under a heat lamp to dry )

So I wiped the oil of the horse too of course.

Oh I see, well, if you wiped the horse clean then yeah, make sure you fill those gaps on him! The guys packs should be fine.

psstoff995's lbro

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Close up his eyes a little.

The horse is too much on the red side. Try giving it a little more brown. I would recommend tamiya XF-10. Do highlights and lowlights on the horse as you would with clothing. Then make higher highlights on the high points such as those on the rear hump and leg muscles. You can also accent by putting a white stripe on the front of the head and/or on the lower part of the feet near the hooves.

The figure is great. You did good on the camo. However, as of your latest post, the face needs more depths and highlights. Make good on the eyes. Put a stripe of black where the eyelashes should be. And after everything is dry, put a dab of clear gloss over the eye to give it a little shine. If you can, you could also put a small white dot in the middle of the black of the eyes to represent reflected light. Be careful, though. Don't make the dot too big.

Don't push yourself too much, man. Just have fun and do what you can and before you know it, each of your figures will be better than the previous one. Figures are fun and challenging to make. Plus, remember that you are building a replica of something that is alive. That's the big challenge in figure modelling. Have fun.

I agree with the horse tips, and while I agree that the face needs more depth, I'd stay clear of adding more detail to the eyes, in fact I'd take some away.

At 1/35 scale you don't want the "whites" of the eyes to be white, but the same color as your flesh highlights. And while you need eyelashes, clear gloss on those tiny eyes is not going to be easy to control or to look right. At 20-30' (1/35 scale) away, if you see eyes, you don't see a shine. The eyes should look like black dots or slits, and not round dots, because you're not painting the black circle of the eyes, but ovular dots because you're also painting the colored part of the eye, and if you look into a mirror (without going all wide eyed crazy haha) you will only see about 2/3rds of your actual dot. So it's like a dot with the top and bottom painted over- look at that dio book by Shep- theres a great section of face painting where he does the dots as lines, then paints the flesh over top them to cut them down to slits.

Other than that- I agree, no need to go overboard. It's looking great Will

The painting looks OK but the soldier figure looks terrible. Look at those slim legs, the guy had probably got malnutrition or polio - or both. What a pity!

Regarding eyes... Soldiers are usually outside and squint a lot... 

Look at those slim legs, the guy had probably got malnutrition or polio - or both.

The legs look that way because they're molded to fit the saddle...