Progress on Martha was faster than expected, and she was completed today:
Building and painting her was probably the most enjoyable part of the whole exercise. Doing a reasonably competent version of the pattern on her vest was a challenge. I tried a number of methods, but ended up painting it freehand onto a piece of clear decal (this took three attempts), and then cutting the decal into six pieces to fit over her, er, complex three-dimensional curves...
Painting her jeans was fun, too. Over a base-coat of airbrushed medium blue, I applied fading with carefully dry-brushed layers of light blues and greys, and finally some white to pick up the highlights. I then applied standard shading and highlighting techniques to her jeans as a whole:
Her bag and jacket were a challenge - not so much the painting, but getting them to stay in position. Martha's arms are made of vinyl, and when I first completed the figure, her left arm, and the things she was carrying with it, stuck out at a very unrealsitic angle.
Test-fitting showed that her coat would fit snugly against her left thigh. However, supergluing the jacket to the jeans just resulted in a paint-to-paint bond, which fell apart as soon as I stopped pressing the two together. In the end, I had to remove all the paint from the connecting areas of her jacket and her jeans, and superglue the bare plastic surfaces together. This caused quite extensive damage to her oil-painted left hand, which I restored by applying oil paint directly onto the vinyl. I'm still not totally confident that this will prove a long-term solution...:
Finally, the flesh and hair tones. Martha was only the third dark-skinned figure I've ever painted (the first being the bow gunner on the Tamiya 1/35 PBR, the second being Kieron Dyer from the notorious Airfix Euro 2004 Footyblxer sets (well, at least we qualified that time...) It wasn't as hard as I expected. I started by mixing up some 'normal' flesh-tint from oil paints, and then added burned umber until I had acheived the right basic shade. From then, it was a question of darkening (with burned umber) or lightening (with the basic flesh tint) as required.
Her hair was more of a challenge. Basically, it's black. Over a full-on lamp black base, I added burned umber and alizarin crimson in semi-dry-brushed layers, until I had achieved something like the level of highlight and contrast I was looking for, and then quit while I was ahead:
The tattoo of a butterfly on Martha's right shoulder, BTW, was done with a Humbrol insignia blue enamel and a fine brush, painted directly onto the oil paint, after having practiced a couple of times on paper.
Final piccies of the complete model and base tomorrow.
Cheers,
Chris.
Cute and cuddly, boys, cute and cuddly!