Lady Justice

After a long break from the Malifaux models, I have circled back on them. Lady J had been sitting on my desk, primed, for months now and I was feeling guilty for not having even put a spot of paint on her. True to my charter, I spent extra time working on her. She's got some mistakes and problems, but overall I think she turned out fine. I should note, I haven't played a game of Malifaux for quite some time now, but the models still hold my attention.

Also, while working on this model, I used a wet palette the whole time. I'd recently seen the tutorial on Jeremie's video about the wet palette and it gave me just enough extra information to try it out one more time. Rather than just use it for a couple things, I specifically used it for everything except when I needed to make the odd wash or glaze, for which I used the ceramic palette. Overall, I had a very positive experience of the wet palette. Enough to justify buying a better setup to use it more extensively.

What went well:
* Working one area at a time - For this model, I worked on logical section at a time to completion before moving on. For example, I did skin, then shirt, then pants, then hair, etc. This actually worked out quite well for me. The nice thing was seeing a section come to completion before moving on. The hard part was that until I was nearly done, it was hard to get a better sense of how the overall color balance would turn out.
* Wet Palette - This worked out great. Perfectly thinned paints and the ability to keep working with them and re-mixing as I went was super useful. I only wish P3's came in droppers bottles.
* Red Hair - Per my previous post about using Kuler to create swatches, I implemented that swatch in the process of painting the hair. It worked out quite well. I also implemented advice I had gotten from EricJ to "ignore the sculpting of the hair" to a fair degree. How that shook out is that I treated it as a textured surface, but did not use washes to shade it. Instead I used 2BB techniques to shade it as if it was a flat surface. Working over a white primer base and the thinning from the wet palette did the hard work of creating "texture" to it.

What could have been better:
* Chalky finishes - Some regions of the model have a sort of chalky finish to them. I'm starting to learn a bit of why this happens, but I'm still not great with avoiding and/or fixing it. More thin glazes are what I've heard, but I guess I didn't apply enough of them.
* Better use of complimentary colors - I should have thought out my color scheme a bit more ahead of time instead of just deciding as I went. I think the color balance is not all that great, and I did a poor job of using complimentary colors to shade with.
* Silver NMM - It's just not as good as it should have been. Probably needs darker shading.
* Fine details - I had some trouble with some of the fine details and picking them out properly. The belt is an example of where the belt loops and very top of her pants don't have enough distinction between each other for the eye to properly track.