Candy

Another ridiculously small model. This is definitely stretching my skills to paint these tiny models and to do it to the best of my abilities. I'm enjoying the challenge though, and I can honestly say that I never really felt like I just wanted to "be done" with this model. It has a certain sort of fun to it due to the pose and implied story. Unlike the studio scheme, I wanted to capture a more realistic skin tone and more innocent looking appearance while still maintaining a hint of malicious intent. In hindsight, I think having the eyes looking to the other direction would have been better (since the scissors would have been more "behind" her), but I still like how this turned out.

What went well:
* The eyes looking to the side gave a bit more of a scheming look to her.
* The overall composition turned out ok, although there is a something I can't quite pin down as wrong. Maybe someone will notice and let me know.
* Lots of details! I really spent the time to pick out the little details on this model rather than gloss over them. I feel it really helped the overall appearance and yet it doesn't look too "busy".
* Lots of happy accidents! I'll point these out later, but there were a number of happy accidents that happened.

What could have been better:
* Blending on this small scale is still difficult. There are a few spots I'm not terribly happy with (shirt and skin for example).
* Mounting to the base just didn't work out. I knew it would look like she was somewhat floating, but there wasn't much I could do. I either needed to file the bottom of her shoes down more, have her leaning forward, or just go with it. In the end I decided not to stress over it and just do my best to minimize it without doing surgery or making her look like she was going to fall over.

Ok, now it's time to talk about "happy accidents" and what I learned while doing this model. Typically when I paint, I tend to focus on a particular area and base, shade and highlight, before moving on to another area. Then at a later point, I'll go back and clean up things that need some adjustment. While I was working on Candy, specifically her face, I had a number of happy accidents along the way. Rather than correcting them at the time, I decided to just leave them and I'd address them later. The main ones were the corner of her mouth (her left) had a little extra dark shading to it, and her eyes were off center when I painted the irises. Once I was done with the first pass of work on the face, I noticed that these (and other subtle "mistakes") led to a more mischievous expression. So the lesson I learned? Sometimes the small mistakes should be left until later when the overall composition of the model is more assessable.

Anyway, my long weekend is nearing a close. Time to get Pandora primed before I have to start tackling my weekend tasks that I've been putting off.