From Start to nearly finish
Hello there Folk of the Mortal realms. We are back again to continue our journey across the Hobby
Today we'll be looking at a model from my Slaanesh army that I've been working on as part of my Cancon army (Hopefully). Really this is just going to be a whole bunch of photos of the same model as I progress from stage to stage as I talk about what I've done during the process as well as my thinking behind it.
The Model : Synessa - The Voice of Slaanesh
So Synessa. Why is she in the army when its still 6 months away and who knows what'll change in that time? Synessa is one of the newer models in the Slaanesh range, a support character with several board wide abilities, not overly pointsy. But most importantly fits the theme of looking cool at an event I'm not aiming to play to win.
The Build.
So whilst Synessa looks cool, I personally like the head from Dexcessa and have substituted that part, whilst maintaining the arm configuration of Synessa to avoid confusion. Another factor is the back mounted wing cape. During assembly I decided I really liked the look of the model without it. This has the benefit of being more compact for purposes of fitting cleanly on a display board without getting in the way. I will however need to contact the TO prior to the event to ensure it is acceptable incase someone is scared of my off meta painting project and wants to claim it affects their LOS and therefore not legal.
If this is the case I haven't filled in any holes so it will be a simple task to build the Wing cape and add it later if needs be.
Priming.
I've gone with my standard Zenithal Airbrush prime. Using Vallejo Black, followed by a couple of greys on the downwards angle as well as white from directly above. This is marginally help me with transition's but I know I don't use the zenithal as effectively as I could. But it really helps me see the details of what I'm working on which is I find a pain with solid 1 color base coats.
The Skin.
This would have to be the primary component of the entire paint job. If there's 1 thing I find most frustrating about skin, Its when its painted too flat and 1 dimensional. I've gone out of my way to firstly work with multiple different skin tone colors as well as build up some reds, purples and greens (yes) into the skin.
During this process I started off from the airbrush getting some basic highlights and shadows going before moving to the brush to reinforce these along with using some reikland fleshtone sparingly to add some more depth. Once I was happy I had everything roughly where it should be I started throwing some very very VERY thin Glazes of reds and deep purples into a lot of the recesses as well as mixing in some dark greens with my darker fleshtones to glaze into some of the shadows.
The goal of this is to try and create a much more "alive" looking skin tone. Skin is naturally quite translucent so you can see colorations of things like blood, bone, bruising. If we paint our skin using only a base coat, wash and edge highlight then we are missing out on so much potential to make the paint job more visually interesting.
The Cape
Honestly not much to say here. I worked on this at the same time as the skin to help see the whole picture together. The Zenithal highlight at prime stage gave us some preset shadows and highlights which I used to my advantage. At this stage the cape was hit with a watered down Purple ink, which has the consistency of an ink but its being used to color the surface rather then settle in the recesses, and maintains a very see through effect allowing our shadows and highlights to come through.
Where to next?