“Fourteenth of the Hill” – Repainting Triss Merigold, part 2

Welcome to another instalment of my repainting Triss Merigold series. You can see the first part here, and today I want to quickly describe two things: her skin and her trousers.

Repainting the face

The first thing I did was the skin, for which I used airbrush and some paints:

Here on the corset you can see an example of how I used the colors to build up the highlights and shadows, because the this is basically the same approach:

I used some Vallejo 71.271 German Red Brown with a little Magenta Ink from Liquitex for shadows, and some white to underpaint the places for highlights.

I applied my skin tones with glaze of Vallejo 72.704 Elf Skintone and 72.703 Pale Flesh, which were later covered with a fine mist of thinner mixed with Cadmium Yellow Light Hue from Liquitex. 

Her skin is freckled only on a narrow part of her face, so I had to change my tool to a paintbrush and thinned down Brown Ink from Vallejo. After this stage I moved to painting hair for a moment, as I was not sure how the paint on the model would react with my paints and if it wouldn’t peel off from the masking around the hair. Fortunately everything went smooth, the paint kept sticking to the model and I could return to the face.

I painted her eyebrows with Vallejo 71.293, and slightly modified the color with a bit of 72.704 Elf Skintone.

I applied the shadows around her eyes by airbrushing Vallejo 71.048 Engine Grey and I outlined the eye with a paintbrush. Whites of eyes look good if you add some skintone to off white and only use white as the color for painting light reflections on eyes. I also corrected off white and shadows on her eyelids with a fine glaze, and the blush on her cheeks with Citadel Contrast Flesh Tearers Red.

It’s only when I already had the base color for the whites applied, that I outlined her iris, and I colored the eyes in the very end.

I slowly moved down, creating lights and shadows around the nose and mouth. I also added color to her lips, using the same paints I’d used in the earlier stages.

I added some detail to her lips….

… and just cleaned up everything, while adding touch-ups and details. The face was basically done, so let’s move to the trousers.

Repainting the trousers

For painting the trousers I needed to protect the upper body, so Triss dressed up as a ghost and went “BOO!” 😉

The trousers were basically painted with two paints. The base was Vallejo 07.952 German Grey, and the highlight was 71.132 Aged White and 71.270 Off White applied in a zenithal way with my airbrush.

The next stage was a bit more annoying, as I had to pick the right thickness of my airbrush paints and try to get the feel of the trigger to achieve the same kind of grain of the base color to texture the trousers in my planned way.

This also gave me a chance to correct the placement of lights and shadows used to accentuate seams and construction of the trousers. Flexible masking tapes from Tamiya were perfect for this job.

Finally the most tedious part, the lockstitch, which is the decorative stitch on Triss’ trousers. But it was more of an exercise in patience than any secret techniques. Usual brushwork. 🙂

Done (for now)

So yeah, here is what we have been discussing today and in the next part I’ll address the corset and the base. 🙂

See you soon 🙂

UPDATE: If you want to read the last part of the series, here is the link to part 3.