Painting the Mauler...begin!

Ok, so I fixed the Mauler's broken toof, and have started painting him. Here's a pic of him with primer only. He's looking, uh, very black. Nice even coat though from the GW Black primer. While quite pricey (~$10 per can) I find that the GW primer really does go on very smoothly and doesn't cover up any of the details while having a very deep black color. Much better than the black primer I would get from other brands.


On with the painting. I've never painted blue skin before (starting to see a trend here on this blog? :) ), so I had to go through some experimentation, as you can see from the various different patchy areas on other body parts. Also, like most people out there, I really don't have any clue how to blend well. So these Trollbloods will be my first real attempt to learn some blending. Hopefully they don't come out looking like garbage.

I started with the hand and arm since those seem to have the most defined ridges and I figured it might help me with what I need to highlight and what needs to be shaded (I'm also terrible at lighting...guess it's why I didn't go to art school and instead became an engineer).

I started with a basecoat of GW Regal Blue (the very dark blue) and worked myself up through light watery coats of Enchanted Blue, Electric Blue, and then Space Wolf Grey.

I think that the result is ok, and will probably go back and clean up the edges and also try a tiny bit of ink in the crevices to deepen the color just a tad.

The blending though still isn't very smooth and I wish I could make it smoother, so hopefully as I go through the rest of the model, I'll get better at it and can come back to the earlier parts like this hand and touch it up.

Having tackled the hand and forearm, I decided to attempt his stomach. Same color steps as before, except instead of waiting for each watery coat to dry before applying the next, this time I tried blending while the paint was still wet.

This was a pretty stressful exercise as I had to move really fast and keep adding lighter and lighter shades while the paint was still wet, and normally I'm a pretty slow painter.





The good thing about doing this though was that I think it actually became easier to make a smoother looking blend.

The bad thing is, as can be seen in this pic, is that it was really hard to tell how strong of a blue each section was while it was wet, and while I was frantically trying to add more shades.

Toward the end, I paniced because I thought I was seeing "rings" of blue and so I added a ton of Space Wolf Grey and Skull White all over the stomach.

The result is kinda what you see here, where there's a lot of white, and then it makes a pretty jagged transition to blue.





This is a shot of the side of the stomach, where in the upper left corner you can see a couple more color steps between the transitions.

I think this is closer to what I would like to see on it, but I want to have a smoother set of steps. I'm going to go back to it today and see if I can smooth this out some

One thing I'm really liking about this blog is that I can see all my mistakes magnified in hi-def when I go to post these pics up.

Below is a final pic of the work done so far from the front. Here I guess the stomach doesn't look too bad and would just need a bit of touchup. Maybe a bit more blue around the upper right edges.

Ok, back to the work at hand. I'm going to try to finish up the underside of the left arm, touch up the upper side (the thumb and sides of the fingers), and touch up the stomach today. Also, if I still have time before 24 comes on, maybe I'll start the right arm too.