Since my last post, I finished the wee spaceman scene, and I must say I’m quite pleased with it. It has a nice focus, while also feeling almost like a two-dimensional painting. I normally like the three-dimensionality of figures, and would usually try to create a scene that’s interesting from every angle (which can be difficult, as you can imagine) because they’re pieces that get picked up and turned around, but this one really sort of works for me.
Anyway, here’s the finished scene:
The fur was surprisingly straightforward, if a little repetitive. The spaceman, once again, was a very quick job. I have come to hate that wrinkle over their bellies, though. I find it’s disruptive to the lovely roundness of them, and I keep finding myself trying to accentuate the fold without losing the roundness, and it’s troublesome. The next one has already had the wrinkle shaved off.
I also decided to give the astronaut a digital faceplate as an excuse to give him an expression that enhances the posture. It’s a common problem with helmeted figures – you need to really work the pose to create the emotion otherwise it can fall a bit flat. You can also do things with lighting, etc., but I felt the spaceman has the right look to carry off the emoticon face.
Next on my plate was, of course, the slightly delayed but lovely Fox Jupiter, standing in for Aeon Flux. She’s proving quite paintable – much more so than Trevor, surprisingly – and I’ve made some pretty good progress:
To match Trevor’s shiny plastic armour, Aeon is getting a shiny vinyl jacket. Some parts are considerably less shiny than others because her arms and rifle will obscure things a touch (mostly on her right). I fully expect to discover that almost nothing is visible when they’re in place.
The logo on her jumper is (hopefully obviously) an anarchy symbol. Aeon in the animations was a sort of an anarchist – her role wasn’t to overthrow Trevor or to kill him (she actively went out of her way to save him several times), but to simply be a spanner in the works. She opposes the rigid order of Bregna and exists to disrupt it – without Bregna and Trevor, what would she do?
I also felt the anarchy symbol was a pretty obvious thing to include without having to come up with my own logo. The alternative was to try to suggest ‘No Gods, No Masters’, but I don’t think there’s enough space in there to have fit it in.
I’m mostly looking forward to getting onto the stuff on her back – it looks like a sort of quilted fabric that I’m keen to do in metallics, as if it’s a kind of shimmer field generator or something. That’ll also let me get some more greens and purples in there, hopefully without making it all a bit too monochrome.
I also still have to work on her arms, and I’m thinking tattoos could be interesting. I’ll have to google cyberpunk tattoos to see what sort of inspiration there is.
Finally, I was recently commissioned to do a couple of small animal scenes in the style of the ducks. I don’t normally do commissions because my painting time is really ‘me’ time, but I quite liked the idea of doing more tiny scenes, and they don’t take a lot of time at all in the grand scheme of things.
So, first up is a recreation of the whio scene. I’ve only really done the base so far, but I thought I’d take the opportunity to see if I can improve on the original with some more detail, textures and a touch more saturation – not too much, of course, because the whio itself is a pretty muted duck, and I obviously don’t want it to be drowned out.
The white fluid is the first layer of sculptable water. That’ll get built up a bit to create a stream. I’ll also need to bring out the colour of the rocks again, as the moss has kind of overwhelmed them a bit.
Fet Paints 