On The Desk - Mean and Green Part 6 - Finishing touches and Showcase!

I don't like this shuffling many projects at once, there is lots of progress but not much feeling of achievement from finishing something! Thankfully that is coming to an end with the first one done, This article will be a finishing touches on the model along with painting the base and then final shots of the completed piece, let's get started!

First of all there were some finishing touches to do to the model itself, namely the OSL and gems on his front. I didn't take any progress shots for these as there weren't really many steps involved. Here is the before and after shot for both the gems and OSL. Gems were done in an icy blue, nothing revolutionary, you can look back to my Wraithguard build or many guides on the internet for how to paint gems. 

I've never really done OSL much beyond a few plasma pistols but this model is a great opportunity for it with the flame in his hand. I used the Fluorescent Green from Warcolours (you might remember my review many months back, this is the first chance I've got to try it on an actual model.) I used black and white to help get the gradient in beforehand (a lot of this work was done by the zenithal prime but I adjusted it on the flames so the centre would be the brightest) then I applied several slightly thinned glazes of the fluorescent paints on the flame and even more thinned to the surrounding area (you can see this most clearly on the pommel of the dagger, chain and his breastplate. I also did a minimal glow on the eyes too (after this photo, can see it on the final mini) I'm really happy with the final effect and I think it really finishes the mini off.

The base! I hate painting bases I've made, I always seem to use too many flat surfaces and I can never get them looking how I want, this one was a real trial. From my standard Zenithal prime I used a sponge to add texture to the throne with a variety of shades of grey (and later some green) to try and mimic the variations in colour you find in some stone. 

Here you can see the green hints I've added to the throne. I decided to paint the lion's face on the throne in an almost NMM gold style. I used the S75 NMM gold set and some green and purple glazing in the shadows to help reinforce the lighting. This is actually one of the things I'm happiest about on the base and I didn't even really consciously plan it, I was on a skype call with some other painters and just kind of sketched it out. I decided to keep the surrounding area black and white so I used some greys to help highlight that.

The steps I did a blend from black to green at the front on each of them just using glazes really. The trim on the stairs I wanted to look like metal trim. I decided to stick with NMM because I've used it everywhere else and I thought it would clash if I suddenly had some large tru metallic areas on the base. Frankly this caused a lot of problems, I don't really know how to do NMM on such large flat areas so I mucked about for what seemed like hours with glaxes, sponging and all sorts of effects and I've ended up with....something. It doesn't really look like metal but it will have to do! Again no photos because I was frustrated so check out the showcase at the end!

And here is the finished piece. I'm pretty happy with the mini and mostly happy with the base. I think if I'd had a solid plan from the start rather than making it up as I went along I could have made a more impressive throne diorama but there we go. Lessons learned for the future!

As always any constructive criticism or questions in the comments below please :)

 As a reminder this was for a little friendly competition in a painting community, theme was Mean and Green and I think I covered that quite well!