Once in a while my friends and me have a miniature exchange. During one of those exchanges, one friend came up with one very peculiar model. And everyone got one of those to paint.
This is model from Scibor Miniatures, one of the specials I guess. It depicts a dwarf floating somewhere with an inflatable band on. Somuch fun.
The cast was good, detail awesome, but the design is somewhat flawed in my opinion: on the right arm side, where the arm, belly and rubber duck meet, there is a gap that is near impossible to reach, yet can be made very visible to the eye. It took great care, planning and a lot of swearing to get it right.
On to pics!
I have been using what I learned from Mathieu Fontaine a lot here, especially on the skin.
As the model itself was pretty ridiculous, I wanted to do a base that would even further the ridiculousness of the piece. So I depicted it in a modern day public swimming pool. I Remembered Fontaine's words "how much do you need to tell a story?" I placed only a small portion of the rim of the pool, with those kind of straight up tiles along, and warning lines saying "NO DIVING". Immediately everyone recognizes the place, the setting.
I'm not overly fond of the water effect. I think I finished it too hastily - hell, I lost interest along the way. However, I am very excited about the inflatable duck. The texture and coloring is just perfect, I think. It really depicts one of those really cheap inflatables.
I had fun with the tatoos - I hardly ever do tatoos, so this was a learning experience as well. Did I do the best job? Meh. Did I have fun? HELL YEAH!
A fun fact: I have tried a ton of ways to paint the foam on the beer mug, and each and every one more elaborate than the other. None of them seemed to work. So in frustration I gave up and went for an easy escape. In the end that was exactly what I wanted it to look like. This made me remember other Fontaine wisdom:
"Don't try to fuck an ant in the ass."
