Skarre, Queen of the Broken Coast

Now this was a remarkable model to paint. Beautiful pose. Great detail. I think I'm in love! Seriously, this was one of the most fun models to paint out of all my Privateer collection. After rushing through all the other Cryx stuff, it was nice to hit the fully painted mark on Cryx with this model. Definitely worth spending the last 2 weeks working on her.

There were a number of things that went well, and a number that went poorly. First the good stuff. The skin worked out great. I used purple to shade the skin, bringing it fairly dark underneath where the light wouldn't hit directly, but not completely to purple. I feel it gives a rather warm feel to it. The detail on the face worked out pretty well too. I spent a lot of time trying to get the details to a level I was happy with. I'm still no expert, but it was a marked improvement over previous projects.

The base worked out great. Two key things here. First, it was pre-sculpted, and had lots of detail. After doing probably 5 or 6 washes and 3 or so highlights, I was pretty happy with the level of variation. Creating two different wood styles worked out better than I expected as well. It really helps the whole thing pop without being overpowering. Second, I used beach sand to fill in around the base. I didn't even paint it. Just superglued it down and it looks good. Gotta love natural beach sand.

Highlighting overall worked quite well. I used a combination of washes and highlights on some places, and multiple layers of two-brush-blending on others. The coat in particular was a good learning experience. I tried to get a bit more hue variation, and then do some decent blending while not changing contrast too quickly on the blends.

Ok, now a couple bad things. First, not attaching the sculpted base to a normal plastic base beforehand was a mistake. I ended up rubbing the paint too much and having to do some touch ups afterwards. I had debated it initially, but just decided to deal with it later. I'm starting to consider the merits of completely assembling the solid parts of a base before priming.

Second, and much worse, the model fell. At least twice. It cause some paint chipping. Mostly this happened because I hadn't attached it to a proper base, and just used a pin which I stuck to an old spray can. Being the clever monkey I am, I forgot to properly glue the pin in, so it fell off and landed on the edge of my porcelain palette. Fortunately it missed the wet paint, but unfortunately it chipped the paint in multiple places. I really hate doing cleanup work like that.

Well, enough of that. Again, this model was awesome, and I'm glad I spent so much time on it. Now that Cryx is done, it's time to obsess on a Legion paint scheme!