Lighting/Colour Ref

Going for a pretty “safe” colour scheme.

Painting Journal

2026-06-18

Printed the bust after doing a run of miniatures for a friend. There was a significant support failure on the hair at the front. The pic below was taken after I’d already applied some UV resin to the area to try and repair it. I don’t have any pictures of the print fresh off the printer.

I resculpted the hair as best I could with milliput - this was my first time working with it and I think I did okay even if I didn’t quite nail the sanding step.

2026-07-07

Primed the bust. It came out okay. The support failure and resculpt means it’ll never be a masterpiece but it’ll make for good practice anyway. I also noticed at this point that the entire thing is covered in voxel marks and there were a couple of other instances of layer shifting, so definitely not a masterpiece.

2026-08-07

Today I airbrushed on base coats of Vallejo Game Color Hexed Lichen (purple) and OP Paints Snakeskin Leather (ochre). The purple came first and then I used masking tape to cover up the clothing - to some success, I didn’t manage to cover everything. I didn’t quite nail the ratios and managed to spiderweb my paint job in several places but it’s a good place to start from, especially when I’ve historically struggled with my airbrush. I also noticed the yellow and purple interacted interestingly where I had overspray, so I’ll try and leverage that in the brush painting stage.

2026-08-14

Painted over my more botched areas of airbrushing and put quite a bit of time into painting highlights on the hair. The highlights are a mix of OP Snakeskin Leather and Bleached Bone. I also spent some time deepening the shadows and using my observation from the airbrushing stage, I mixed VGC Hexed Lichen and OP Snakeskin Leather to make an ochre-tinted purple for the shadows. I glazed this over several areas to add depth.

I’m enjoying how painterly this looks and I think to really sell the effect that it’s intentional, I’m going to have to go back and tidy up some edges.

Oh, I also added a very light initial base coat mix of OP Dwarven Flesh and Snakeskin Leather. I’ll probably tone that up a bit more next session. She’s going to need a pretty fair (and pink-shifted) skin tone to go with the blonde hair.

2026-08-16

Locked in and painted for 3 hours today. I focused mainly on making the hair at the back look more intentional and then painting up the skin and face. I’m pretty happy with how the eyes came out, especially. I think the most challenging part of this paint is going to be shading the hat and cape to look interesting.

2026-09-06

Worked on the clothes today. Namely, changing the coat to have the white trim, per my concept sketch, adding a bit of texture to the corset, painting the leather and buckles, and making the inner part of the cape a different shade of purple to add interest. It was also at this point that I realised I’d reversed the colours on the concept sketch.

I asked on the mini painting Discord for some advice on where to take the painting next I got the suggestion to add a bit of stippling texture to the cape/hat, to make the fabric look a little shiny. The sketches provided by Gnillab on the Discord are shown below.

2026-09-07

Followed through on the advice and did some stippling. Quite happy with how the textures are coming along, it really does add something. Next session I’m going to darken off the shadow side of the hat a lot more.

2026-09-14

Finished!! Honestly, after all my issues with this model and needling to resculpt the hair, it’s not as noticeable as I initially feared. It was still a great practice piece and still may even be worth entering in my first painting competition since I think the paint job itself is quite good.