I managed to finish my Thagrosh model tonight (5.5 hours total). I had the usual "smurf" bad camerea issues, but this time I brought the photos into Photoshop and did a simple image>adjust>auto levels which cleaned them up quite nicely. They still look a little better in person, but now the photos look much closer in color. As usual I tried to do a few things new with this model. Most noticeably this model has it's eyes painted, which is something I have not done before. I kind of did them reverse all black, then white in the cennter; because I though it just looked menacing. I did a better job of blending when I painted his horns going from a blue black to grey white that I like pretty well.
Also of note (but not so visible in my crappy camerea shot) is that after mat coating this model I came back and painted his gorey back bits and his chest stiches with a clear glossy finish by hand. It really manages to 1) brighten up the red almost to what the GW wash looks like wet (which I love much more than the muted look after it dries) 2) It makes it have that still frsh wet look.
The last new thing I tried is pretty minor. For the cloak, instead of the usual base coat plus highlight layer I based in straight black and then watered down my colors 25% color to 75% water and painted on two layers to get the coloring I wanted. I think this achieved the same effect only it looks more blended and pro-like-cool then my personal ability to achieve the same affect using normal methods ever could. Of course this adds an extra step of drying time which slows down the painting process even more. To make the stiches really pop I ran over them with a extra watered down (read 1:3 H2O) GW blank ink to help darken where the pieces of fabric and stiches meet - nice black lining effect. Then I ran over them with the stiching color. Same thing for the chest stiches only I used a very small amount of GW red wash then I came back with a very small brush and applied black ink just to the skin crease.
