Showcase - Keysha from Purgatory

It's Purgatory time again! Their third competition closes today, so it's about time I showed off my entry for it. Keysha was Purgatory's third release, and the only regular "trooper" so far - the others are what I'd call bosses or sidekicks.

Anyhow. Keysha. Paint.

The bonus category for the comp asked for was OSL, in addition to presenting a finished Keysha. I backed out of going full OSL as I haven't had that much practice at it so instead I chose to paint her as if she's stood in a spotlight on stage, mid solo. 

The first step to pulling off this effect was to paint the base. I used a khaki/light brown mix to create the base tone of the wood then added layers of watered down brown and black ink (mixed equal parts with each other before water). This allowed me to make full use of the lovely wood effect on the base and also to build up the highlights while still keeping a wooden tone. I made the edges very dark, showing stage just outside of the spotlight. To complete the effect on the base I marked out where Keysha would be standing and washed in a stripe of shadow directly below her, allowing me to use directly above her as the light source. 

I then worked from the bottom upwards on Keysha herself. Her slightly angled pose leaves her shoes and the front of her trousers in the light - or it would if the Keytar wasn't in the way! - so I worked some highlights in on her thighs and the tops of her shoes. 

A the same time as working in the highlights, I added shading to the backs of her legs but added a little more highlight to the top of her belt and her calves. I then set about painting her skin, hair and Keytar. 

The keytar I initially planned to paint as if it was black highlighted up to blue by the lighting, but that quickly went out the window in favour of just being a blue keytar.

The skin tones involved a similar process to the test model I did a few weeks back, but I got a little stuck with the hair for a while. I eventually decided that as a rocker, she's likely to have wild coloured hair. With that and the top down spotlight in mind, I made most of her hair purple, taking care to leave the areas on the sides and bottom a much darker tone and bringing the top sections and the blue fringe up to much brighter highlights.  

I took a similar approach with her glasses - I couldn't work out if I should do them a funky colour or not, so just left them as black but highlighted from above. 

The final areas to complete on her were her bangle and her top. Once I got to the top, I realised that she was very much focused in the colder range of the colour spectrum, as are my Death and Saint Peter models. I decided to inject some warmth with a yellow bikini, but when I came to shade it, I stumbled slightly and didn't know which direction to shade it. In the end, I chickened out and faded some green into the bottom of it, which allowed me to shade the green at the bottom and highlight yellow at the top, with a finish of the same blue as the rest of the model had. 

The bangle was a happy accident really, a small amount of OSL given off from a luminous glow stick wrapped around her wrist as a bracelet. I added a little OSL to the other bracelet on her arm to try and show it was still giving out a little glow.

I hit a big mojo blockage at the halfway stage of her - after finishing her trousers and before starting her top half and I haven't quite worked out why that was yet, though it did set me back a couple of weeks. I got a kick into gear though when I found out I had a lot less time than I thought to finish her, as I'm off to see Captain America: Civil War at around the time I'd normally be cramming photos into the computer to send off the comp entry! This led to me finishing her top half inside two day sessions last weekend.

 

Here she is alongside Death and Saint Peter. With the three of them together as they are it really brings out the cool palette that I appear to have used so far on this range, which is entirely accidental, though probably has something to do with my current love of Coal Black and Rlyeh Grey.