A tale of two swords...
Well, it is complicated, and mostly happened by accident.
This model was a commission. The customer envisioned this elf in chrome armor with a \"blinking\" etheral sort of sword. He didn\'t suggest that I paint the sword that way (we thought it would be impossible to pull off), but either as normal steel NMM, or chrome.
So it got chromed. Then when I posted the almost completed model on the yahoo mini painter group, the chrome just got roasted over the coals! Nobody liked the chrome sword, not even the customer!
Only little old ignorant me.
Of course, now that I look at it 6 months later, I know why.
So in desperation I hunted for ideas on CMON. Then I stumbled across Chrispy\'s CMON Grom, which I had commented earlier, that I\'d use his idea.
So, I extended the blue part of the chrome to be in line with the lower part of the leg. Then I dotted in some random shadows to represent the thorns wrapped around her calf. The sunbursts on the sword were also eliminated with paint...
The washed out look was achieved by wavy super-thin streaks of white. The white was mixed with too much drying-time extender, on purpose. The paint doesn\'t mix in well with too much extender (more than 20% extender is needed) Then when it gets painted on, it is streaky and tends to have very subtle faded edges as it slowly dries.
So for brushstrokes, I just did little horizontal wiggles with my brush across the surface of the sword.
The color was so thin that it had to be done in three layers, with the final layer accounting for touchups on the sword edges and such.
So I guess it\'s just superthin white glazes wiggled over the underpainted surface.
I don\'t know how else to explain it, because it really wasn\'t started with that idea in mind.
So she went from this:
to this:
which is as close-up a shot as I could do at the time.
I hope this gibberish explaination helps a little.
Peace!
-Angela
:innocent:
