“Unpleasant Dreams” (Fembruary & More)

You may (or may not) remember back in November of last year I sculpted this “chibi” caricature version of “The mistress of the dark” herself Elvira as a bit of a personal challenge, well since then she has now become eligible for two more “challenges”, Dave Stones “Paint what you already have Challenge” and “Leadballoony’s, Fembruary Challenge”. (See links at the bottom of this post).

Dave’s challenge is pretty self-explanatory (and I have had her since November) , but Alex’s Fembruary I thought I better explain, basically in the month of February you have to paint up one or more female figures in honor of “International Womens Day” and miniature ladies in general. So after asking if I could take part and receiving a “yes” from Alex, I’ve thrown my hat into the ring and decided to paint Eliva as my submission for this fun little challenge too. It’s not too late to join in the fun either just let Alex know via the link and let him know you are interested.

So as I’d now promised two people I’d get her finished I thought I’d better give her a good licking (with paint that is!), so as usual she was begun with a spray undercoat of matt black, and then I touched her up (I’m not doing this on purpose. You know!), with a brush and some more black paint, well she is predominantly black after all. One of the few areas that isn’t though is her fleshy bits so I turned to them next, and taking, dwarf skin, dark fleshtone,and pale flesh from my “Vallejo collection” and my other pale flesh by “Miniature paints”, I mixed these together till I had a tone that looked about right and used this as a base before adding her eyes in cream, lining around them and adding the pupils in black. Next I took my Elfic flesh and as I thought it was a little too pale, added a touch the pale flesh again and highlighted with this, while this was still wet I took some fusia and added a little rouge to her cheeks and above her eyes. After undercoating her lips in dark red I highlighted them in bright red, and added her beauty spot just below her left eye with a dot of black.

Her dress as you can see is black (stating the bloody obvious!), now I usually just highlight black with some dark grey but as I planned on doing this for her hair I thought I’d better come up with something else here, so…I highlighted it with dark grey (What! wait a minute. You said you weren’t going to do that! I hear you cry), well yes, but once this was dry I then mixed up a glaze of royal purple and painted this all over her dress, tinting it slightly.

Now her exposed leg had been painted flesh along with the rest of the “fleshy bits”, but it was now time to add her stocking, so I nixed up some dark grey and chocolate brown and thinned this down to a glaze and applied a couple of coats of this to her “pin”. Her shoes were touched up then with some more black and then these and her hair were highlighted with yet more dark grey. That just left her “dagger” belt buckle to do in chainmail for the blade and bronze highlighted with bright gold for the hilt, a dot of metallic red for the jewel at the hilts top finished this off, and I was calling her done.

I knew I wanted to “Quickshade” her (I always do), but I didn’t want her as dark as usual so I went for the Soft tone instead of my usual Strong tone, and I painted her base in my usual method of, chocolate brown with subsequent dry-brushes of khaki and coffee. Then splodges of scenic green and hairy flock were added here and there and she was ready for a quick “blow over” with some matt varnish. Really done!

I’m reasonably happy with the end result, I don’t know if the lady herself would be, but as I stated back at the start of her sculpting….”Women are difficult! (But lovely with it!)

I’ll leave you with this that was actually on one of my birthday cards from last month. As “The Imperfect Modeler” would say….

“Well it made me laugh….”

Till next time, stay safe, cheers Roger.

https://wargamesculptorsblog.blogspot.com/2020/12/paint-what-you-got-challenge.html

https://leadballoony.com/