[Sunset Retribution]: Issyria, Sybil of Dawn

Issyria was a blast to paint, for a few reasons.

First, I had to paint her in separate pieces, because her crossed legs added some interesting challenges with getting the interior cloth painted.  Luckily, they’re a separate piece, so it was not hard to do this.  Still, for speed I rarely paint models in separate pieces anymore, so it was fun to go back to a different method for conquering a tough model.

I used the airbrush to handle the orange, as I always do.  Then, I painted all of the cloth by hand, until it came to the bluing stage, which was again airbrushed (with orange bits masked off using silly putty).

Another reason Issyria was fun was because she’s a floating model.  Unlike all the terrestrial models, which is almost all of them in any given game or manufacturer range, she’s floating well off the ground.  So, there’s no worry with how to place her on a base, and there’s loads of flowy fabric to get to paint.

One issue I found with the sculpt was the face.  It’s rather pointy and the detail is fairly shallow.  That leads to a fairly washed out look, regardless of how much contrast I try and use.  The picture above makes it look worse than in person, but still…  I focused on learning to paint faces and I really enjoy it now, and this sculpt was painful.

Right next to the horrible face, though, is a key reason this model was so much fun to paint:  THE HAIR!

Oh man, that huge ponytail is so cool, and brings so much flavor to a relatively static model.

I chose to use a jade recipe that I’ve been playing with for a differet project.  It features a rich, blueish green base color and works up to a yellowish green at the highlight.  I thought it was a nice counterpoint to the orange armor and compliment to the blue cloth.

So, this is the last addition to the Sunset Retribution for a while.  There may be more later, but this is the last of it for now.