FEED YOUR HEAD

The original Escher head fucking popped off, what you're gonna do? I replaced it with an Ice Naiad head from Kings of War. I actually prefer the substitution, I wanted to mix an alien into the pluralistic cadre of femme fatale.

The bronze metal is the same recipe described in the orange post (a mix of complementary colors), just used in a different scheme. I really like the effect.

I was feeling lazy by the time I got to this gal, so pretty much all the blue on the model is the same hue. Just another lesson in putting the right colors in the right places (mentioned in yellow).

Baldric was always my favorite of the ZBP heroes, nicknamed "the Cannon" for his late-game capacity to shell zombies with an onslaught of ranged spells, upwards of six shots a turn if you play it right.

This sniper is a reflection of her lover, featured in my yellow color study. Both utilize a purple-yellow complementary color scheme, as the two colors oppose each other on the RYB color wheel. Here yellow takes a backseat to the dominantly purple hues, only featured in the skin tones and the gold headset.

This is another Escher with a custom, extra-thick ass courtesy of greenstuff. I love curvy women and I loathe painting the random bullshit details that GW insists on tacking to every surface.

I'm not as satisfied with this sniper, as I feel I've underhighlighted her hair and boots. Sometimes you just have to call it, though; perhaps I'll be inspired to touch up her details soon. I do enjoy the metal; purple is a useful hue for injecting color into both black metal and grey steel.

On the RYB color wheel, yellow and purple are opposites. This sniper and the next one are Yang and Yin, effectively two different approaches to a yellow-purple complementary scheme. They are also lovers.

Yellow famously takes many coats in acrylic painting, which can make this color out of space a frustrating hue. To mitigate this when basecoating the boots and hair, I used a little trick I learned on R*ddit: basecoat with a strong pink, then cover with yellow. Works like a charm.

The gold armor was achieved via the same method explained in the orange color study: mixing together complementary colors to get a brown shadow, then "highlighting" by adding one of the colors. You may be tempted to use a really dark purple, but that's not necessary; what works best (i.e. less time mixing) is something strongly saturated. I think I used Citadel's Phoenician Purple or Pro Acryl Royal Purple.

Note also on the NMM: no blending. In fact, I don't think I blended anything on the model only thing close would be the purple glaze on the latex. The NMM looks sharp not because the layers are finely blended together; its simply the strong progression of saturation and hue, applied in progressively smaller layers. This illustrates one of my painting mantras: the right colors in the right places. I sometimes call this method "sketch style."

The darker skin tone came out much better here than in the red color study (where I think I went too bright). For painting darker human skin tones here is a trick: basecoat brown and highlight with skin tones, not just browns. And human skin tones are a lot more varied than race theory implies. This is all to say that brown is not brown is not brown; your choices in hue for basecoat and highlight matters. In this instance, I started with a dark brown (to serve as a visual break among bright yellow), and highlighted upwards by mixing yellow-ish skin tones into this base color.

No custom greenstuff butt this time, mostly because I thought the latex skirt with the gogo boots were kind of a look, I dunno. Color-wise there is a nice balance on the model with how this worked out.

Differentiating orange and red can be a bit tricky, since it's tempting to highlight red with orange. Ditto for orange and yellow: push too hard into yellow and suddenly nothing is orange.

The bronze was achieved by mixing together two complementary colors: orange and blue. The two hues oppose each other so you don't need to pick a dark blue, just something really saturated. Together they make the dark brown base, and then by adding progressively more orange I highlighted upwards. This is one of my new favorite ways to paint NMM because you can be so intentional with your colors.

Other than that, I'd say Escher #2 came out pretty well. The skin and latex are slightly more practiced (that's a custom, greenstuff butt btw), the weapons are evocative and pop well. But frankly my favorite part of the model was an afterthought: the dirty cloth and feathers. I almost chose not to distinguish the feathers at all, as they're kind of a low-value detail. But I'm glad I did, they draw attention to the dirty cloth which illustrates my "sketch style" method.