Gokufan's Celestial Genesis Twilight

I didn’t have a lot of painting opportunities for a week or so so it took me awhile to finish her eyeballs, but I eventually got through all 40 or so of them.

They looked a bit “off” to me, so I checked Ben Komet’s version and realized I hadn’t shaded the scleras at all. I shaded them a bit with some glazes of desert yellow/ivory. (They don’t look nearly as yellow in real life as they do in these photos). I also painted the tongues coming out of the back of her head with gory red and basic skin tone. I used the same colors to touch up the connective tissue between the eyes a bit.

She’s looking almost done at this point, the main thing left to do is her bells. They seem fragile enough that I want to base her first so I don’t accidentally snap them off.

This is my first time making a base from scratch. I’ve only bought gaming or gaming adjacent minis in the past so they’ve always come with bases. I headed to Michael’s and a 50cm wooden cube ended up catching my eye.

First I measured the cube to find the center, and drilled a hole for her main base pin. The I put a drop of paint on the bottom of her secondary base pin, used it to mark the cube, and drilled another hole there. Then I stuck her on the cube without gluing. I put a layer of miliput on top of the cube to surround her integral base. Then I use my finger to press some grit into the milliput to create some texture. The last thing I did before leaving the milliput to cure was glue down some bark mulch “rocks”.

When I was looking at a reference picture I noticed there was supposed to be a bead hanging from the end of her front arm wrappings. Mine doesn’t have one; I might have thought it was flash and clipped it, broke it off with rough handling or maybe it was a casting error or was damaged during shipping? Whatever the case, I think it adds to the composition of the sculpt so I tried to make my own out of green stuff. My sculpting skills are rudimentary at best so it’s not great, but if I decide I hate it it will be easy to remove. I’ll paint it along with the bells.

After the milliput had cured overnight I primed the whole thing black and added a layer of gloss varnish followed by a layer of matte varnish. Then I basecoated the dirt with VMC Dark Ocher and the rocks with hull red. Then I washed both with AP Strong Tone. It looked comically terrible at this point so I was sure to include a picture.

I drybrushed the whole thing with desert yellow, followed by a mix of desert yellow and basic skin tone, followed by pure basic skin tone. It looks much better at this point but extremely washed out.

I had just bought some Secret Weapon weathering pigments so I thought this would be the perfect time to try them out. I used several red/brown/yellow pigments to get a suitably dusty and earthy look, and then set them with Secret Weapon’s pigment fixer.

(due to the way the thumbnails got cropped here you’ll need to click the pictures to actually see the base)

The base still needs something, but I’m not quite sure what. I’ll think on it a bit and update again once I’ve got it figured out.