Iron Painter 2017: Round 1: OSL - Crooked Man

So this was my entry for round 1 of the Wyrd Iron Painter competition this year. You can read all about round 1 here. What follows in this post is just a bunch of random thoughts about my entry and the competition in general. No offense is meant to anyone, and none of this is meant as whining. Just reflection.

My entry was a pretty straightforward project. I picked the Crooked Man since it had a very easy pose to work with. I also chose to put it on one of the new Wyrd sculpted bases, which worked out nicely. I did the project SketchStyle for very obvious reasons. I'm pretty happy with my end result, although there are definitely parts that could have been done better. Going with a white light was probably not the best choice in hindsight, but it was a good learning experience. The model itself though was very fun to paint, and I did enjoy it as a project. SketchStyle is still not a great choice for me for competition quality yet, but this project helped me improve in that regard.

Online-only painting contests are tricky things. There were obviously a bunch of really good entries in this competition. I placed #53 out of 175 that actually submitted entries. The stats are all on the Wyrd forums. That puts me in the bronze tier. The tough thing about these sorts of online-only competitions is that voting becomes very obfuscated and getting feedback even moreso.

One thing I realized too late was that my photo quality could have been better. Instead of multiple angles, I should have just focused on a single photo. There's places where the photo washes out the colors a bit which is really unfortunate. I saw plenty of models where the painting quality was probably not as good, but the photos made them look much more flattering. For my next entry, I will make sure to spend

I noticed that almost all of the gold and silver tier entries were dioramas to some degree. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but it does sort of reinforce to me that I wasn't aiming for complete competition level by sticking to a properly based model. I will definitely say, the #1 place entry was fantastic.

At this point, and given the week that I've had, I'm having a really hard time mustering the enthusiasm to continue the competition. The rankings of various entries was a little surprising to me. Still though, my goal was never to try to win, or even place in the gold/silver finals. I really just want to make it through to the end of the competition without a DNF. Hopefully I can pull that off. Of course, if I have another crazy life week this coming week like I had last week, then I'm screwed.