E2046 GK Competition 2017

Remember that Anime figure that I painted up a couple of months ago? No? Well, I'll add some pictures to jog your memory.

Anyway, I liked her so much, that I decided that I'd put some pictures into a massive online competition being run by the Chinese resin cast figure company E2046. The competition is a pretty big deal for enthusiasts of these kinds of figures, and literally hundreds of hours have gone into some of the entries. It's all done with photos too, which was a bit of a novelty, but I guess that the main drive is to promote the hobby and their business. There are some big prizes too, with a $500 USD prize for the winner and over $2500 up for grabs in total. It is all in store credit though, but still it certainly puts Golden Demon to shame!

The competition is run in 3 categories. Figure, is for single resin anime style figures. The second category is "Mecha", which is pretty much the Gundam category or giant robots to most people. The third is the always impressive, but obviously insane Diorama category. The reason that I say it is mad, is because the smallest figures they make are about 1/8 scale, so painting up more than one is literally several months of work.

Anyway, my entry is now in the gallery and all I have to do is wait till the 14th, when the initial cut will be made and the finalists will be selected. Here's hoping for a good result!

My Gallery

On a side note, I painted this thing a few months back , and I submitted the gallery about 6 weeks ago, so the competition feels a bit distant, which is something I've actually really enjoyed as it has been nice and relaxing.

Sometimes looking back to the beginning, I wonder where I found the energy to finish it!

An angle that didn't make it into the final gallery. I like it though, she looks kind of annoyed from down here.

The Competition, main gallery

Resin Anime Figure - Part VI

Almost there now. I finished and attached the second lance, so it's mostly just finishing off the detailing now and adjusting to taste. On the downside, she barely fits in the light box; having become rather wide!

Not too much to say at this point; if you missed the rest of the project, there are plenty of other posts that take her all the way back to bare resin. I'm still experimenting with improving my photography too, which does seem to be working out so far.

Anyway, enjoy the pictures...

Resin Anime Figure - Part V, Lance 1

Well, despite several New-Year related setbacks, I've been busy again. 

I've painted up one of her lances to look like a piece of marble. This is just a quick post to show the progress I've made in that regard. I'm also trying out some different photography techniques and set-up, which is coming out rather nicely actually. I still have no idea what to do with lights etc, but generally moving them about and taking a ton of pictures tends to yield a few good shots.

I still need to paint the shaft of the lance and the green stuff on her head where I repaired the hair gap as well as patch up a few bits here and there, but the end is in sight!

Resin Anime Figure Part 4 - Assembly

How's that for an update!

Thankfully, I finally got to the stage where I could start putting her together. I did a bit more airbrush work over the Christmas Holiday - mainly painting up the hair, the base, and the capes/flames. It was a big batch of stuff to do that took a lot of coats of paint in the end. I was a bit undecided whether to start sticking her together, but after a bit of indecision I decided to just go for it - with the thought that either way it was going to be hard to paint up the remaining details. The one part that was a real struggle was the shoulder armour, as I had to paint the whole thing assembled and she is getting rather spindly and difficult to handle at this point. It was pretty funny to work on though as I was painting her at the same time as my brother was working on his Bio Titan (see my Christmas Post for more on that one) and we were both at weird angles trying to paint round corners. It was like a lesson in how to paint unsteadily with bad posture.

I really like the cape/flames thing going on here. It was a lot of individual bits to do, but the effect is quite cool.

Oddly, one of the other things I had difficulty with was the base. Not because of the detail so much as it was that the thing is so smooth and large that the colour had to be applied really evenly as any uneven bits looked absolutely terrible. I tried to varnish the thing at first, but it didn't work and came out really blotchy. I ended up going over it with a few coats of dark grey with the airbrush to even things out again. It seems strange, but it really was unlike painting anything I've ever had the need to do for 40k or any game system.

At the moment, I'm thinking that the Red looks a little too strong, but I think a lot of it will be blocked when I get her weapons on. They'll also be a source of a lot of black and marble colours, so it'll reinforce the look of the whole thing and strengthen up the scheme a bit. Likewise, I was a bit unsure of what colour to do her hair when I started working on it, but after about a dozen coats of various browns, I settled on something that had a bit of red to it as well as some lighter tones. I didn't want to make it too stark and risk overshadowing the whole piece.

The other thing I need to work on is the gap between her two hair sections. At this stage, I think the best thing to do will probably be to fill it and then paint it in by hand. I have no idea how I'll get a colour match though! I think it'll be a job for a lot of layers of thin paint to get a smooth blend, although maybe I'll be able to sculpt some detail into the gap that'll help it mesh. I guess we'll see. I also need to finish painting the horns.

Well, that about sums up the progress for the minute. I'm happy so far, but this is turning into a real project and there's still a long way to go till the finish line. I reckon one or two more posts to go till the end (like maybe one per lance, and a final roundup). It's a strange thing though - I feel like I'm looking at someone else's hobby from the outside and it can be surprising what a steep learning curve it causes. Then again, that was kind of the point at the outset; so I'm calling it mission accomplished so far.

Resin Anime Figure Part 3 - Painting Marble and Verdigris

Well, it was a bit of a slog, but I've just finished the first pieces - namely the torso legs and head. One of the reasons I took this project on was to give my painting muscles a bit of a stretch, and I'd say they're now suitably sore!

The good news is that so far everything seems to have gone really well. One technique that you don't usually see used on Warhammer, but that I've used a lot on this model is Stippling. Essentially it is just jabbing your brush at the mini (but with finesse) to build up a series of circular marks. It builds great texture and is good for weathering.

On this piece, I used a bit of light stippling on the marble as a first coat to build up a bit of colour difference and make it look more natural; before painstakingly adding the veins by hand with a series of glazes. I also stippled on some of the verdigris to get that blotchy aged look.

As if that wasn't enough for that technique, I used a real messy stippling of different Browns to build some interest into the belt.

Everything else was painted with an airbrush and brush technique.

The verdigris was surprisingly easy. I painted the brass with Brass Scorpion (one of the best paints ever hands down). I then gave it a wash with Rhinox Hide, before washing a mix of Vallejo Blue Green, Olive Green and White over the appropriate areas. Once that was dry, I added more white to the mix and started washing some into the recesses again and stippling small dots to get a corroded finish. I did one more coat, just adding little dots and finally a wash of Caliban Green into the deepest recesses to get the tone back where I wanted it. It sounds like a lot of steps, but it was all washes and stippling, so the basecoat was by far the most difficult bit (although it took some artistic eye type stuff to pull it off).

I also did the back. It's a shame her hair will be covering a lot of this. The cool thing about this shot is that you can see the highlights I did with the airbrush on the back of her elbows.

I also finished her legs with the same verdigris. Next up is her hair and base and then I can finally glue what I have together - I just hope she'll be worth the effort.

Resin Anime Figure Part II - Painting

My new project is continuing at a good pace. I had the opportunity to get her primed over the weekend. She is so big that it was a bit of a task - in the end, I gave her a few thin coats of Vallejo grey primer and then topped it off with some GW white spray in the hopes of not only getting good coverage, but also impenetrable hardness, as I'm a bit weary of painting resin. Especially when a lot of it is so smooth and has nothing for the paint to get its teeth into.

After that fun, I got the chance to actually start painting her last night. Like usual, I took some time to plan out the colours I wanted to use and the order I was going to paint them in. This might seem a bit superfluous, but with the airbrush accurate planning can make a lot of difference. It's mostly to do with hitting the large areas first, but I would also normally paint the darker areas before the lighter ones to prevent some of the problems with overspray.

Speaking of overspray, I've found a trick that works really well to remove unwanted paint should you happen to miss with the airbrush. It isn't so good that you don't have to mask areas off, but it does help a lot with small mistakes. What I do is paint finished areas with a layer of Satin Varnish (it has a sheen much like regular paint, so you probably won't even see it once it has dried. Anyway, with that layer in place I then paint the other colours and hopefully I don't miss. If I do I apply a small quantity of Air Brush Cleaner (the Vallejo stuff) on the end of a very clean paint brush to the discoloured area and gently scrub it once the paint is dry. It seems to take it up pretty quickly without doing any damage as long as you then flush the area with plenty of water afterwards. I guess it works because the cleaning fluid is formulated to dissolve paint in the mechanism and so in moderation it works well on overspray, although only in fairly minor cases - don't expect to spray the skin with 10 litres of black and then just get it back off again.

Anyway, I was really happy with the way the skin came out. I actually used a few different colours to get the effect - It feels like a bit of a shame that most of it won't be visible when she's finished as it'll be underneath her dress and only visible from rather crafty angles!

I laid down a base coat with a mix of Pale Flesh and Dark Flesh. This gave me a slightly yellowish tone that had a bit of warmth to it. I then added some orange to the mix and shaded round the edges of her clothing. I then did a few small highlights with pure white (points of light). At this stage she was looking a bit blotchy due to all the colour variations, but I then smoothed in all of the transitions
with a thin coat of Pale Flesh. I'm really happy with the skin tone, it's definitely a recipe I'll be using again in the future.

Shading the face was fun too - I used the orange to add a shadow above the eyes as well as some colour to the cheeks. One of the cool features of this figure was that it came with eye decals, so after I'd whited out her whole eye (as this would show through the clear areas of the decal), I just had to apply them straight over the top - although it took a bit of lining up.

I'm also having a bit of an experiment with "Micro Sol". It's a solution that dissolves the decal into the paint to supposedly give it a painted on look. We'll see if that works, but either way I'll do a bit of varnish over the top of that to really mesh it into the figure.

Finally, I had a bit of a start on some gold edging and a bit of a rough start on some white marble for the armour. It's still early days, but it's looking pretty good. I didn't manage to get a very good picture of the marble, but maybe next update!

Resin Anime Figure

At a bit of a loss at what to do next, I've changed projects completely. After spending a few weeks in Japan this year, I picked up this anime figure as a side project. The last time I went, I tried out Gunpla        (Which is Gundam Figures to most people - it turns out they're rather interestingly made, but maybe that's a post for another time). This time I have a rather interesting Demon girl to make. She's 100% resin, which should be familiar to most people in these parts.

The fun of a project like this is that it not only gives me a break from Warhammer and army construction concerns (like that pile of infantry that everyone has somewhere they still need to paint), but also gives me a chance to try out some weird and outlandish painting techniques, which in the long run will probably improve my hobby skills. 

I've started taking on a lot of odd projects over the last few years, they normally end up leading to an improvement of some type. I think the real change was how I see myself. In the past I always thought "I'm a Warhammer player" but for a year or 2 now I think of myself more as a miniature artist - maybe it's just that I spend so much more time painting than playing; or some kind of delirium brought on by proximity to so much plastic.

After several hours of building, I'd finally built her to the stage of having several large airbrush-able bits rather than several dozen resin pieces. Interestingly her resin is almost nothing like the stuff you get in the west - it feels a lot more like plastic and is considerably lighter in both weight and colour. I don't think it would take the level of detail needed for tiny marines (she is rather large as you'll see in the size comparison with a daemonette below).

The parts hang together quite well themselves, which is lucky for test fitting.

That's one big weapon! She has a pair too, so I'll have my work cut out for me.

With something this large a big challenge is always getting some interest into the big-ass panels. A base coat and edge highlight doesn't really cut it anymore when you're about a foot tall!

I'll post about her later. I've already done a bit of heat bending to get the parts in shape and some gap fill, so I should be painting her next time.

ではまたね