I am attempting my first bust right now–The Grudge by Jason Wiebe.  So far, I am pretty happy with it.  I am very happy with the “leather” armor.  I decided to make the armor studded leather as opposed to metal.  I just thought it would add something new to the figure as all the pictures I see paint it as  metal.  I am quite happy with it.

This weekend, I did a lot of work on it, but very little show for it.  I tried out the “salt” method of weathering his pauldrons, and I have moderate success.  It is not as good as I hoped it would be, but it works.  It is a method that will require some more practice.  Both the process and the under-painting need work.  The rust color I just never got right, and I thought it was ok, but it just isn’t “rusty” enough for my tastes.

The skin still needs a lot of work.  It looks ok right now, but it is rough.  Where I am really struggling right now is the hair (and there is much of it).  No matter what I do, it just doesn’t seem to have the depth that I would like.  I have painted a lot of dwarf beards in my life (heck look at the blog title), and I am ok with it, but for some reason this one is not coming together.  I need to look at my colors again, and perhaps spy on other versions of The Grudge out there.

Other than the beard, the next challenge is the right eye.  I want to paint it as dead, and I have some ideas, but we see how it works.  Just linen white right now does not work (as I expected it wouldn’t).  It just looks like an unfinished eye.  I hope I can get it to work though as I would really like that effect.

Some pictures of the WIP: