Ral Partha Death Dealer part 2

Death Dealer (with shield of failure)

Taking a break for the horse I spent a few hours working on the shield.  At the end of that I had a big pasty yellow failure and just painted over the entire thing.  Try that again later.

The next part I worked on was the fetlocks of the horse.  Again I spent a lot of time looking at various horse pictures to see how real horses look.  Surprising me was that many dark horses have white fetlocks and thus are more likely to have light hooves.  Normally the colour of the hair just above the hoof determines the colour of the hoof, which makes sense as the hoof is just hair.  So white fetlocks, light coloured hooves.

To blend the fetlock area I base coated the lower leg in a light tan colour and then did a number of rounds of wet on wet blending to try and get the transition from dark to light tan to white.  I used the wet on wet technique as I didn’t think glazing the dark brown to the light tan at the start of the fetlock hair would work very well.  So instead I did a light base coat and once that was dry put on the dark brown and tan and blended the two together with a fair amount of one brush blending (thanks Ben Komets).  This was then repeated for the tan to white area.  Finally the bottom of the fetlock hair was touched up with white using some very small brush strokes.  The brush strokes were done in the direction of the hair to enhance the effect.  I did a number of rounds of the blending until I though I was there.  Then the wife mentioned that the white needed to go further up the leg so I got to do it all over again.

For the mane and tail I wanted to start near black (as dark bay horses normally have black(ish) manes and tails.  My base colour was VMC German Black/Brown + VMC Dark Sea Blue + Black.  I’m finding these mixes are looking much better than just a straight colour out of the bottle.  They seem to result in a more nature looking colour.  I then highlighted (only) up with VGC Beasty Brown, VGC Bone white and some VMC Flat yellow.  I added in the yellow more an more to try and get that sun bright look.  I didn’t want to just highlight with tans and off whites as that would end up looking bleached.  I kept with the zenithal lighting idea but when highlighting selectively choose a few hair stands each time to paint.  This way the hair had a bit of dynamic lighting to it.  I’m ok with the tail but think the mane may need some more work as the upper neck area will the lightest area.

Love that saddle blanket.  

As there were no reins on the figure I made some.  I took some easter egg foil wrapping, smoothed it out on a hard flat surface and then cut out the reins.  These were then superglued into place.  The advantage of the foil is that you can shape it and it retains the shape perfectly (being metal).

The saddle blanket was a bit of a disaster zone to start but in the end came out quite well considering the loss of detail over time from the mould.  I would love to see an earlier production run of the figure as the saddle blanket has some great sculpting work on it but in areas it’s just all but gone as the mould has deteriorated over time.  So in order to try and work around that I ended up choosing some detail to highlight (and in some cases it wasn’t there on the figure) and repeatedly highlighting that same part again and again.  This way the paint layers actually started to build up and a near lost detail could be recreated.  I got a bit distracted and didn’t really keep track of the base colour.  Pretty sure it was VGC Khaki.  The shadows were AP Soft tone and in the very dark chevron I used VMA Armour Brown.  The highlight colours were VMC Light Sand and white.  The highlight and shading went back and forth a number of times as I keep making the shadows deeper to pop out the highlighted details.  I don’t remember how many layers I did on the top of the blanket but over 10 at least.  However it’s the part of the figure I’m liking the best at the moment.

I’ve started the armour, axe and cloak so hopefully next time round they should be well under way.  Yes, VMC Dark Sea Blue is used a number of times.  It’s almost becoming the unifying colour of the figure.