The last step of any figure I do is usually the eyes. I’ve very apprehensive about working on eyes as I’m still learning and getting the hang of things. The past few figures I’ve been fairly satisfied with the eye results, but this time, I’m having a little bit of trouble…
The first step is to pencil in the eyes. Any mistakes here can be easily erased and the process restarted.
Once the penciled in eyes are satisfactory, they are inked over the penciled eyes using a rapidograph technical pen. I filled the pen with blue ink.
Once the inking is done, I used Tamiya enamels for the eye color. Enamels are great here because any mistakes can be cleaned up with lighter fluid or enamel thinner and this will not harm the base face paint. Additionally, enamels have a slow dry time so the paint will self level as well as blend well to create a nice gradient.
After the base eye color is done, highlights and blending with white and a lighter shade of the blue are painted.
After all this, things start to go bad…. The eyebrows are done horrifically however that was done with enamels so removing them isn’t a problem. I also attempted to apply some eyeshadow which didn’t work out very well. Some of the highlight lines are a little messy. Regardless, this needs to be fixed.
For the first attempt to fix things; I clean off the poorly done eye brows and cleaned off the eyeshadow using enamel thinner and alcohol respectively. The highlight areas are redefined for better distinction. The black lining is toned down a little.
The eyebrows are redone using a darker mix of enamel browns.
I applied a few drops of clear gloss over the eyes to create a wet look to the eyes. I didn’t want to re-mask the area just to spray on the clear gloss, so I applied un-thinned clear gloss right over the eyes with a brush. This worked well for one of the eyes, but for the right eye, it blurred some of the blue and highlighted areas. So after taking some pictures and looking at it for some time, I decided that it needed to be fixed.
The blur is fixed and the eyes are finally somewhat satisfactory. I may go back and fiddle with it more or just break down and just strip the entire thing, face paint and all; and start from the beginning. The only worry is to match the skin tone with the body if I respray it.
In the middle of the eye issues, I took pictures of her put together. Initially, I sprayed a semi gloss over the red areas, but after taking the initial set of pictures with the first set of eyes, I found the finish to be a little too glossy.
So a flat coat was spayed over the red, and I think this looks much better.
The finger nails are painted using a mixture of pink and clear red enamel to get a darker pink color. The same color was applied to her lips.
And of course, the gratuitous panty shots…
