Odin Bust

After the last journal, I finished up the arm of the jacket and had worked out how I wanted the leather jacket to look.

I followed the same process for the rest of the jacket for the remainder of the jacket. I built up a prussian blue basecoat and overlaid it with a stippling effect to build highlights towards the light source.

As you can see above, I also got the fur coat laid in. I put a basecoat of burnt umber down and then drybrushed a mix of yellow ochre and burnt umber to build up a highlight.

From there I finished up the rest of the leather on the main body, this was done with a base of dark green, building up highlights on the high points of the leather. I then used a similar recipe to the wrist band and shoulder armour to build the leather up around the belt.

I then worked on the raven, I started off underpainting it with a very diluted dark purple glaze, I then drybrushed it with a mix off prussian blue and art black, trying to keep some of the glaze coming through. I finished up with a drybrush highlight of the previous black/prussian blue mix combined with vanilla white.

With that the main body was complete. You can see below that I pushed the highlights on fur shawl up higher on the shoulder closest to the light.

Finally to finish off I had to do the staff. Unlike the box art I didn't want to do an OSL from the staff. Instead I based it with burnt umber using an airbrush, I then went in and drybrushed the staff with yellow ochre. Finally I drybrushed moss green onto the more leafy textures to build the idea of a mossy staff.

With that I finished up the bust, I varnished it and got my usual post job photos done. I really enjoyed revisiting this model, it was great to finally finish up a project from so long ago. All I need to do now is print a plinth for it and get it mounted to join the others on the display shelf.

On the last journal, I'd wrapped up the skin tones (mostly) and laid in most of the gold NMM. From here I started to work on the leather surrounding the gold patterns. I wanted to avoid my usual warm leather (like I did on Craig Scrapfiggs) and aim for something a bit more desaturated.

To achieve this I started with a base of Burnt Skin, keeping it thin to allow the zenithal highlighting to do some of the work. I started the coat at roughly the mid-point between total black and full white as the opacity of the paint and the natural darkness of the brown meant I could quickly build a good looking shadow coat. Once this was laid in I added some vanilla white and stippled a texture onto the previous coat, through this I was able to create something that looked like this:

One thing you'll also notice on this is that I re-did the gold NMM on the chest bangle/band in the background. The more I looked at it the more I felt the gold was too warm in relation to everything else on the model. I also put some NMM iron/silver on the studs on the shoulder and the wrist band.

This was done using the same general mix I use for greyish NMM. I start with a Burnt Umber base and then add thin coats of a mix of Burnt Umber and Pastel Blue. I find this gives a nice bluish grey that works really well for more matte NMM.

Finall I started to work on getting some colour on the jacket of the bust. Using the arm as a guinea pig I decided to start with a base of Prussian Blue. This was applied again using thin coats and using the total black as a shadow point to further pull the lighting to the front of the model. I then mixed in Pastel Blue in increasing quantities to use for the highlights, this was applied with stippling and made use of the natural textures of the model to create the following effect:

This is starting to really come together now and soon I'm gonna have to think about a plinth for this as I'm pushing through a lot quicker than I thought I would.

After finishing my Jane Byrne statue I was looking for something a bit different when I came across a project from way back when. Back when I started into miniature painting I picked up a couple of busts off ebay. One was a roman legionnaire (which I will at some point pick up) and the other was a bust of Odin from Nuts Planet.

When I picked it up I think my ambition was a lot greater than my skill set, not in itself a bad thing but it meant that I quickly got discouraged, at this point I'd painted maybe 3 space marine heads and not much else in terms of skin. The change from 32mm space marines to a full bust led to some interesting results.

While this wasn't terrible it wasn't anywhere near where I wanted it to be and ultimately I put the bust down and forgot about it for about 4 years.

Now with a couple more busts under my belt and more of an idea of the skills needed to paint skin along with the techniques like glazing and blending I decided to give it another go.

First things first I re-base coated it using the Pro-Acryl primers, giving it a standard zenithal highlight with slight focus towards the face.

From here I then used the Scale75 Artist range, specifically their skin tones set that includes a really good set to quickly get a good skin tone set in place. With this I was able to create the following:

I left the eyes blank for now as I can come back and get them right when I'm closer to done. I then moved onto the gold NMM pieces, I didn't want too much gold on this piece but I found the ring/brooch on the chest, the should guard and the bracer detail to be good candidates. I used Burnt Umber to create a dark brown base coat which I then overlayed with very thin coats of Yellow Ochre. I then tried using Naples yellow to highlight this and created the following:

I found this to be a bit too yellow and found it didn't quite read as the gold I'd intended (if anything I think it was closer to brass). I went back over with a Yellow Ochre glaze and then added Vanilla White to it to create a colder highlight colour, several very thin coats later and this was the result:

I'm much happier with this as I found the colour to be much closer to what I had envisaged when I started.

This is where I've taken a brief break and will be going back in later, I might redo the chest brooch from scratch as I think it still reads a bit too warm and there are some gradients I could blend out a bit cleaner but overall much happier with where the project is going.