Allisa, Human Ranger
Allisa is the first of my Ravenloft heroes to get the painting treatment. She is a ranger, proficient with bow and sword, a deadly antagonist to evil. As a specialized class of fighter in D&D, she is effective at hitting multiple targets at a distance and hitting a single foe. Her armor is good but not the best, and the same for her health. She makes a good hit-and-run combatant. |
I like the green cape and green base from the center picture, to go with the green theme of the ranger cards. The green scale armor looks neat, but I don't want Allisa to wear metal armor - that's one of the restrictions on rangers in D&D, is no metal armor. So maybe that's green dragon scales? But I'll use brown for leather. I think black hair looks too dark, and it fits the archer persona more than the swordswoman. I went with blonde, but I like the auburn too. Unfortunately, I found these pictures after I did my painting, so there's a lot of nice touches on these that I would have used had I known. Lesson learned; I'm researching paint jobs for my next piece before I do the detail work.
Initial blocking also revealed the major problem I had with this figure, which is that she has no face. More precisely, there isn't enough contrast between the eyes, nose, mouth, and cheeks to paint easily. Usually, I can use surface tension to my advantage - if the paint is sufficiently non-viscous, I can place a drop near to a border and it will spread to the edges. With the low contrast face, the paint flows over details and obliterates what features there are.
As I'm gaining more experience with shadowing, I have the bravery to just paint a dark color in the creases and repaint up to the edges to create shadows. I really just haven't practiced enough to have the confidence that it will look okay. The green cloak could have used this type of shadowing.
I wanted to have dark shadowing beneath each scale of Allisa's armor, and since the blocking was done with a dark brown just meant that I would need to highlight with a lighter color. I mixed bronze and brown for a lighter brown with some gleam and drybrushed the whole armor. By only using downward strokes, I was mostly able to preserve a dark shadow beneath each scale, but there were places near the hip where I screwed up. Her belt was copper, which I hadn't used yet in my painting; it's a nice splash of color that still fits an earthen-color theme. The swords use my new steel paint, which looks a lot like the primer color but with metallic gleam.
| When I was finished with Allisa, I was quite proud of the job. Given the scale, a lot of the imperfections blend together. But looking at other people's renditions of Allisa (particularly the green-themed ranger from above), my work seems quite inadequate. The boots, bracers, leggings, and shoulder-pads all run together (I didn't even see that the bracers expose skin on the underside) and shadows need to be expressed (see the finger separation in some images compared to mine). I was thinking of this particular line from Homer Simpson... Weebly won't let me cue a video, so skip to 0:16. I may buy another Allisa figure and try the job again later. Examining details that have been painted by other people and reviewing close-up pictures of my work will allow for considerable improvement. I'm already implementing this with my next piece, Thorgrim. |