So we finally arrive at the last part of the description of my repainting Triss Merigold. This time we will take care of her leather corset and base, and the model will basically be done. 🙂
If you want to check the previous parts, here is part 1 and here is part 2.

Repainting the leather corset

So yeah, there have been some questions about the way I painted the corset. Well, I am not sure if it is the proper name for the piece of her clothing, but let’s just go with it. 😉

Basics for my leather painting

The whole painting thing was pretty straightforward, pretty similar to the process described in the section about repainting skin. You can look it up there if you haven’ yet.

You wanted to know how I achieved the effect of worn and weathered leather. I’m always glad to share my experience with the community, but answering everybody individually becomes time-consuming and monotoneus. Because curious painters are my favorite kind of people ;), I will try to make your day with this article.

Testing

I started working on the corset with a test board. I tweaked the color of my paint and checked the effects. Here are the paints I decided to go with:

Just because you don’t want to paint over things you have already done or simply want to keep some surfaces clean, you shouldn’t ignore masking. Once you’re ready, you can start painting!

Here you can see the colors put to use on the model already:

And on the back:

Applying colors

And here you can see the lightestcolors being applied on the front, but this is where the real fun begins…

Now I started testing methods of achieving this cracked, weathered look of worn leather. On the test board, obviously. Not risking the model yet!

I got the first satisfactory result from Vallejo Crackle Medium, which turned out great. I eagerly repeated the process on the corset and…? Nothing, as far as I could see. I got really suspicious if the Crackle Medium is not a capricious slut. 😉 So I told her she’s an energy vampire and I tossed her into a black hole. Don’t make me apologize for this! 😀

Problem solved!

The next successful test was made with an effect presented to me by Rejven, my team-mate. It was originally a way to achieve marble effect and uses metal wool. You flatten it and use as a stencil for airbrushing.
If you try this method and initially fail, don’t get discouraged. 😀 I only appreciated my wool after a few attempts, and it was the best when it got all glued with paint.

I applied a mix of varied intensity and color onto light base coat. Usually starting from lighter and going to darker ones. See it here:

Check the weathering on her leather bra part. That was really the effect I was going for!

Working on different parts of the leather, moving the wool to different parts of the model….

Here’s how it looked on the lower parts of the corset:

And the darkest layers bring out the most of the weathering effect, creating the old leather effect:

Finishing touches

Finally I applied a bit of visual separation of the trimming and decorative stitches with my paintbrush:

So that’s basically the whole process. For me the effect was completely satisfactory!

Repainting the base

This model’s base is boring but I had the impression that the wolf sculpt has some potential and can be interpreted in many ways. I decided to go with metallized rock effect. Thanks to the deep sculpt it didn’t require much more than using my airbrush nearly in parallel with the base and emphasizing the volume a bit. It must have been my favorite silver from Vallejo, which is 77.724 Silver.

I did the light reflex in the eye with Metallic Medium from Vallejo applied with airbrush. Then I covered it with a turquoise mix of inks. It’s important to use transparent paints to tint metallics, as they will not make surfaces look flat, but only saturate them with colors.

The next thing to do was using a paintbrush and black paint to paint cracks and grooves around the eye.

I colored the silver here and there by airbrushing some brown ink, and then I covered everything with clear varnish.

And this is what it looks like now:

Done! My thoughts?

I hope I managed to encourage you to buy some statues and proved that they can really look good if you only put some time into upgrading them. Many of them were created by top sculptors, who are paasionate about capturing personalities of our favorite characters from games, comics or movies. I’ll gladly get myself a few more to enhance their looks.

I appeal to you that you don’t settle for the standard, mediocre, factory paintjobs, because it can only be better than that 😀

Now I am compiling a gallery of pics of the finished model, which I will share with you soon!