Brambleten's Tour of Gotham - Part 6: The Head of the Demon 6/50

It turns out that helping run a Kickstarter (Wamp Select Series Paintbrushes - If you haven't seen them yet, where have you been?) is rather more work than either me or Brett anticipated so it's been a massively busy week. Because of this, I haven't been able to finish this guy as quickly as I would have liked. However, he is now done and I'm rather happy with him.

Liam Neeson, or as he is known in Gotham - Ra's al Ghul.

When I started painting him, I decided to set myself a challenge. As I rely quite heavily on Games Workshop's pre-made washes, I decided that I was not going to use any of them on his suit. I would have gone for the whole mini, but I have already started doing my bases using them and they are so damn useful on metal work. 

The suit started out with the same colours as Lotus and Yang did but I tried to make the shading a lot more gradual and subtle.

Once I was fairly happy with the suit, I started working on the area that really troubles me - the face of the mini. I've made it a habit to just throw a load of Gryphonne Sepia at the face, let it settle into the eyes and highlight up but since I was pushing myself on the suit, and the face of Ra's has quite a lot of detail to it, I thought I'd push myself on that as well. 

Using the wet palette I found it quite easy to blend different shades from the Scale Color Flesh set to try and create some depth, while I used Vallejo Ivory for the eyes and shirt instead of white. This is also the first time I have tried to deliberately add eye brows to a mini, and they seem to fit reasonably well. 

The final thing I tested out was the adding of grey to his hair, instead of just highlighting the brown. This appears to have been semi successful, as the sculpt doesn't allow for a massive amount of layered detail to be added to it.

Overall I'm quite happy with the face, but at the same time not quite satisfied. It was my first time attempting to paint eyes for a long while and it shows, as all I can see when I look at him is that they aren't quite right. Still, it's been a good experience overall and hopefully I can push on and do similar to Talia, who needs finishing this week to get the whole gang finished before the ACL Comp deadline.