Valkyrie of Alahan

This mini was painted for the Chick Challenge 2008 competition. It took about 25hrs.

This is my first attempt at painting a female mini. I wanted to experiment with feminine flesh colours and sheer clothing. I was challenged by weisern to try out the sheer technique. For the skin I used warm tones such as VMC goldbrown, sunny skin tone, basic skin tone, brown rose, cavalry brown, violet red. Only small amounts of these were used at different stages. When I got to dark shading areas, it was towards cavalry brown and violet red, whereas for lighter areas it was sunny skin tone, to white. I wanted the look of smoky eyes (the way eyeliner/eyeshadow is applied from dark to light), which I used some reference pics off google images to help out with.

With the sheer effect, instead of painting a lot of the areas with sheer, I chose only to limit the effect on the boobs and bum. To achieve this, I painted the flesh colour over the green clothing. This took many thin applications of the flesh colour. The sheer looks better on the chest than the bum in my opinion.

The base was an interesting one to make as it took a few tries. Instead of baking a huge chunk of sculpey, I decided to wrap the sculpey around a rigid object. The first try was wrapping sculpey around a wine cork which turned out to be disastrous. The sculpey kept peeling away from the cork when I tried to round the outside shape. So I ended up making the solid core out of scrunched up / tightly rolled up aluminium foil. This worked out very nicely as the sculpey was able to grip quite well to the rough al foil surface. The rest of the construction is basically having fun carving out the shapes with dental tools and dremel, adding bit of balsa wood etc.

Guild Artisan,
Mark.