Carnevale - Strigoi

For my next model I chose to paint the Strzyga, a large naked monster which is essentially all skin. I wasn’t entirely happy with the skin tones on Vlad and Miriam, and I wanted to capture the ‘inhuman’ look of the vampire skin more successfully on a model that was basically just skin.

I watched a ton of videos on YouTube for ideas on painting vampiric skin and I saw one which showed a range of skin tones achieved by layering paint almost like glazes over a really dark muscle tissue. This mimics the colouration we see in real Caucasian skin which has a translucency that allows the underlying tissue to affect the skin colour.

Step 1: To establish a clotted blood tone to the flesh I painted the whole model with Vallejo Model Color (VMC) Burnt Red. I then washed everything with Citadel Colour Agrax Earthshade to establish some initial shading.

Step 2: I defined all raised muscles and wings with a thin coat of VMC Intermediate Blue, which is a dark blue grey colour. Please note the model looks like complete crap after this step with huge contrast jumps and bizarre clashing colour placements but…

Step 3: This was the first payoff step and frankly is incredibly involved and time consuming. Basically I used my two establishing colours (Burnt Red and Intermediate Blue) and a ton of Vallejo Thinner Medium on my wet pallet to perform a series of blended glazes over the whole model to create blends between the two starting colours. Most of the model had a minimum of three steps with more for some tricky areas. For those who may want more detail: create a colour blend of red and blue that lies between your starting colours then add thinner (roughly twice as much thinner to paint) to get a very thin paint, then glaze this over the area you want to colour. Repeat this step using different blue /red mixes to remove stark colour changes from the model.

Step 4: Next I painted smaller highlight areas onto each of the major muscles of the model, BUT NOT THE WINGS, using VMC Stone Grey. To blend these highlights and create a smoother look I glazed the raised muscles with a thing glaze of 2 parts Stone Grey/1 part Royal Purple/3 parts Thinner Medium trying to keep this mix out of the deepest recesses and thinning it out with water where it bled into them.

Step 5: Lastly I dry brushed the whole model, wings included, with VMC Silver Grey.

Anyway we are into the last details so I painted the claws and spine with VMC Cork Brown, a wash of Argrax and then VMC Ivory.

The teeth were picked out in VMC Off-white and the inside of the mouth with Burnt Red.

Lastly I used to the Game Color Wash(GCW) Red on raised surfaces like backs of hands, face and scalp and GCW Blue on the hidden surfaces like crotch, underside of thighs and arms to create a visual shading effect using colour.

Basing was the usual method (see previous entries in this blog) and we have another model done (thank the lord).

Was I happy with the result? Yes. Would I do it again? Feck no. It was fun to experiment with paint in this new way for me but, ye gods, it took way too much time. I was going to need an alternative methodology for the other models in the warband, that’s for sure.

The big take away for me is the way that the incredible variation in the colouration of the skin removes all ‘flatness’ from the models skin and adds great visual texture. I think this can be seen in the stark difference between the claws and bone and the skin. They look like different materials which is great, and I can see why these laborious painting methods are used by top tier painters.

However I am not a display painter and the time investment for me is not worth it for the added visuals.