I can't recall if I posted on this, but I've become disillusioned to my Walgreens brand acrylics. They do not mix with the Vallejo paints (which are designed for miniatures); instead, the paint sort of separates. In fact, by itself the Loew-Cornell paints have a whipped-cream spread consistency, which like whipped cream deflates over time. Thus, it does not mix well even with paints of the same brand, and stirring with a paintbrush seems to make the whole thing evaporate like ectoplasm. Even so, the color seemed just right so I was willing to give it a try. You can see below how it turned out; although the color seems appropriate for base resembling a light leather, the exact shade reminds me of loose dog stools (and believe me, I've cleaned plenty of those in my time).
I knew I wanted to add a darker leather color on top of the base, with "crinkles" of the light color showing through like on a worn leather jacket. I thought a wash technique with a brown+yellow would do the trick; unfortunately, either I didn't let the base dry adequately, or I was too aggressive with watering down the wash, so that the base bled around. It lost the aged look I was working on and just looked splotchy. I really couldn't decide how I felt about the look, or where I wanted to go with it, or even how to not make the situation worse, so i just set the figure aside for awhile. This is how the Devil Swordsman looked until I got some metallic paints.
The Feeding Ghoul is another piece from a D&D boardgame, Castle Ravenloft (I think). He has a mostly smooth body (ghouls are rubbery, according to HPL), ragged pants and cloth wrappings, and a disembodied arm. S1 and I enjoyed painting the Feeding Ghoul, mostly due to a serendipitous color combination. S1 wanted to fool around with some colors, so I let him do some mixing with the Vallejo paints. He came up with this mint-green (using regular green and white) that evoked the idea of decaying flesh without looking really gory. He just looks to me like toothpaste or some chalky green candy, and this appealed to me. So, we have a minty-fresh green ghoul.
The plastic figure was originally magenta-ish, and this shows through in the pants (no base coat for this piece). In the first image, I thought the pants looked like something Frankenstein would wear, with a coating of dust or frosted with rime. I ended up combining some of the Loew-Cornell paints for a rusty red (based on a memory of old corduroys I once had) to color the pants. In retrospect, the pants look more vivid and dark than my intention, but they contrast well with the skin color. I added flesh color to the arm (which is odd, since it is ripped off a dead guy - maybe he used CO like a butcher does to keep the meat looking fresh?) to finish the piece. I didn't add any details at this time, mostly because I didn't want to ruin the color S1 and I had made together, and I had just finished overworking the Devil Swordsman. As I write this, S1 is commenting "The ghoul looks perfect," so I suppose it is best we left it as-is.
To keep S1 and D1 occupied while I worked on my pieces, I gave them some of their own to work on. The images below show some of their original work from this time period. S1 wanted a realistic spider, and he used the same loose-dog stool tan from above for the arachnid carapace. We added some darker brown on top and some poisonous blue at the tips for a creepy critter. Unfortunately, I can't find this figure at the moment, leading me to suspect the design has been painted over. D1 enjoyed painting the panther, but she was uninterested in doing much more than just slapping a coat on. You can see the gray primer showing through in many places. I was curious to see if I could add a midnight blue highlight to a black panther coat (see this post), but the new application overwhelmed the original. I thought the sculpt was too attractive to not do something special with, but at the time I had no further ideas. D1 and D2 occasionally just wanted to add as many colors as possible, leading to some psychedelic figures like below.
Spider, done by S1. Colors are reasonable for an arachnid. I'm afraid this has been painted over with a color scheme more resembling the third figure... | Black panther, done by D1. I tried to add some blue to make for a dark panther coat, but the color didn't impress me. | I think this is a ghoul, done by D1. I remember the colors were pretty wild, but I don't remember what the base paint was... resembles glue more than anything. |