Round Three Report from Zaphod Beeblebrox

Zaphod Beeblebrox writes:

This round's piece is Vidar Wolf Helm. He is a Vanir, or Viking Dwarf, from the i-Kore Celtos line. Following is a step-by-step write-up of how I painted him up.

The first thing, as always, is to make sure to get rid of any flash or uneven bits, and prepare the figure for painting. All of the paints used are Vallejo or Vallejo Game Color acrylics, unless otherwise stated.

The first thing we see with this figure is that the hands holding the sword are seperate from the body. Somehow, I don't think crazy glue alone will hold this, so the red circles show where I need to drill holes for the pin with my pin vice. First I drilled the body-part left arm, right in the center.

With a short length of paper clip inserted in the first drill hole, I made a mark on the hand-side when I fitted them together, so that I could drill evenly on the other half as well. A good match is obviously key. The red circles show the pin in the first hole, and the second hole drilled.

Once the figure is prepped, I prime him black and he is good to go!

First thing I like to do is the flesh, face and eyes. Eyes especially, because if I mess them up, I can start over easily :D In this case, I did the eyes after the skin, as there is only a small bit of face showing :) I painted the face around the eye sockets, and then did white eyes, carefully leaving a thin black line around them. Using a spotter, I did small black pupils, and on to the rest of the skin.

The muscle sculpting on this fella is very good! I really wanted to do something cool with it, besides tattoos. Everyone does tattoos. So I started out with a base coat of Dwarf Flesh.

A nice ruddy fleshtone, this mixed up with Flat Flesh was used in layers to highlight the muscles. Faint striations were done on the muscles using the Flat Flesh and White. Now shading. I have always liked the barbarian pics by Frazetta and how he gets the awesome skin tones, so I began mixing Reflective Green into the Dwarf Flesh for shading. I went to about 50/50 for the deepest muscle recesses, giving an interesting olive color effect. I didn't want to mess this up by trying tats either and besides, Frazetta's barbarians didn't have tattoos...

Next, I wanted to do a kilt on him, so I went to Inge's site where she has the "Pseudo tartan" tutorial - since last time I did a tartan, I went nuts with my clan's Tartan, the MacThomas, or Thomson. However, instead of doing a pseudo-tartan, my eyes fell on the Huntington example, at the bottom, and that was it.

I started out with a base color of Royal Blue. Next, I did fat green lines with GW Dark Angels Green. I wanted to highlight up this pattern first, so I mixed some Andrea Blue in with the Royal Blue, and highlighted the squares. I highlighted the green in a diagonal pattern, using GW Snot Green mixed in. I think I used a touch of GW Scorpion Green for highlights as well. The cross-pattern is in white and Vermilion, in a pattern such that each "green" row has a thin vermilion line, and every other "blue" line has a thin white line. After carefully (yeah, right) drawing these in, and subsequently touching everything up, I dotted where the red would cross each other, just for emphasis.

After the kilt, I based everything that would be gold with White, to get a better color. Then I used GW Snakebite Leather mixed up with white for all of the NMM gold. I try to dot corners, and some edges with pure white, to really give the glint of gold. I did about half the gold at this point. I also primed the scales and nose guard with Intermediate Blue for the steel color. The fella's teeth were done with Bone White and White highlights, and the lips were painted using some of my lighter flesh mix and some Scar Red. Just subtle though, 'cause he's a dwarf, but a guy one... (The girl's have beards too...)