At a recent tournament (Event Horizon) I got some somewhat unenthusiastic feedback regarding the paintjob on what I affectionately call fatty & stinkbeast (CSM Nurgle lord on daemon mount).. which prompted me to look a bit closer at it myself.
Turns out it was actually a bit.. uh.. lacking.
Im really happy with the model itself & it has many really enjoyable aspects from a painting perspective.. its just the paint didnt do it justice.
So I figured I should go back & re-work it to a level it deserves - Golden Demon level that is!
Underpinning this is a core strategy I plan to use to help me in my crusade to win a demon: Objective revision.
The basic idea is that once you have painted something & you are pretty happy with how its turned out, take the best pics of it that you can.
Once you have the pics, review them as if you were judging someone else's work..
You know when you look at something on CMoN by a stranger from the other side of the planet & you think.. "well this bit is all right.. but what the hell where they thinking there?! nah.. ill give it a 6."
You will cringe at the amount of little things that you forgot to go back & finish, or that looked good at the time.. or that you just plain missed!
It might sound like common sense.. & ive heard of this before.. but this is the first real time ive ever applied it to my work.
In the example of fatty & stinkbeast, it wasnt bad before, it just didnt have the impact it needed.
At the time I finished painting it before, I though it was brilliant.
After having it reviewed by some impartial judges though, I realised that how I saw it & how it actually looked just didnt match up..
Once I looked at it with an impartial & critical eye, I realised there were areas that were simply washed, or even just base coated.. admittedly they were in hard to get to spots etc, but in GD? Thats instant knock out material!
There were lots of little things that I had become so accustomed to during the hours I had spent painting the model, that I simply didnt see them any more.
The main thing though, there was no where near enough contrast between the rider & mount.. they looked like one big blob of the same colour without the detail to back it up.. I realised that I would have rated it maybe 6 or 7.
It certainly wouldnt have made it past regional level in GD.
This is what he looked like before:
Click pics to view full versions:
Not good enough.
So I set about changing the base colour of the mount.. aiming for higher contrast I went for blue & started building back up from there.
The result so far is much darker overall & the contrast between rider & mount is far more pronounced.
This is it now (Note, the colour is a bit dull due to taking pics at night.. but its WIP anyway):
So that is the result of my first objective review.
There is still more work to be done.. Some of the saddle details, the axe & horns for example..
but once thats done, I will take more pics & perform another objective review.. & I will repeat this process untill I would objective rate it at least as a 9 before I even bother to enter it into a GD.
