The french girl

[Balgin Stondraeg]

Yeah, Privateer Press don't have do some daft things (Like deciding their Joan of Arc should have a Gaelic name). Anyway, she's finaly finished (almost) and I got a chance to take some pictures today so here she is. The sun came out and glared a lot. In the face shots there's my body's shadow on the left giving something closer to the way she normaly looks, and the sun's bright glare washing out a lot of the shading and highlighting (as it does in some of the main pics). I took 16 pictures with full glare, occassional blessed cloud cover and sometimes using my shadow. I then removed the ones which were too dark (sometimes it was my shadow and the clouds at the same time which really did get a bit dark) and wasn't left with much beyond these so here we are folks:













I know the highlights on the hair look crude with too much contrast but that's intentional. The early Ashlynn art featured light brown hair (and what was almost a Christina Ricci photo edit for a face) but the "official studio paintjob" had this ugly bleached blonde albino bimbo freak look going on. The "official" artwork features the same bright yellow hair (dunno why they changed it from the original) and a recent picture (attached) features fair hair but black eyebrows.

Since she's meant to be an outrageous flirt with no sene of fair play I decided she could have blonde hair but she wouldn't be blonde. Plus, as she's a freedom fighter, her roots are probably showing as she hasn't had time to touch them up very often in the last couple of months. So I was aiming for cheap dye job/good dye job growing out. I haven't tried it before and I'm not sure how it came out (her hair actualy goes from a scorched brown/bestail brown mix all the way up to the very light browns and some blonde colours too but the camera sort of muted it down into this light brown thing - it didn't like the contrast much I suppose and I don't blame it :p). The hair colours show up best in the facial closeup comparisson shots.

I'll give her a bit of lippy to. The skin's base is bestial brown so I reckon dark flesh won't look too out of place among the reaper paints that form her complexion. Probably just touch the bottom lip 'though. Even 'though she's a flirt a top lip wouldn't quite work with this face.

[Caerban]

Really lovely work. I think the hair's great. I'd agree, a bit of colour on the lips would be nice, mebbe glaze it on just to add a tint and lift them away from the face a bit. And that purple is particularly glorious. If I had a complaint, perhaps you need to smooth the transition to the blue shadows a bit. Again I think a few glazes just to soften the edges will see you right.
Nice.
:clap2: :clap2:

[Balgin Stondraeg]

I forgot to mention that blue. The blue "skirt" was originaly going to be a darker purple but I loked at the obscene ammount of dark bluey purple colours in the citadel paint range and couldn't work out which ones would best shade and highlight which (and how many people would mistake them for black).

So I used a reaper blue triad and haven't worked out a good basing blue to use for the dark shadows yet so while there's 4 or 5 coats the last two are a huge step up from the 2 or 3 beneath.

[Hawkins]

looks great, i definately see you improving from mini to mini.

[Keeper]

Great work, Balgin.  Can't say I like the sculpt, but your paintwork is really good!

[Balgin Stondraeg]

I'm not happy with the knee pads either but they'll be a pain to get to with that sword in the way now. With the exeption of the boots and cloth, the body's been done for months nopw. At least since the spring if not longer.