Gokufan's Celestial Genesis: Jingwei

On to the actual painting! I prefer to start with the skin, which works quite well for this mini since it’s both very large and probably the single most important element of the sculpt. I originally wanted to give her red skin as a contrast to Twilight’s blue skin (more of a mood contrast than color theory contrast), but as I was playing around with my paints I came up with a pink scheme I really liked, so I decided to go with that. From there I decided on orange-gold and green-turquoise as the other two major colors in a scheme that seems roughly triadic. I’m not great at color theory but I do try.

I started with her bottom half to work out how I was going to paint the skin, since it’s the largest and least complicated area. I basecoated everything with my shade color, then sketched in some midtones and highlights. From there I worked with thin layers and glazes to blend the area together and refine the mids and highlights. When I work this way I almost always end up with a much brighter product than my initial sketch, so I was sure to take that into account.

A note on her butt. I placed the highlights incorrectly in the initial sketch. A butt is roughly two spheres, the highlights should be circles in the center-top of each cheek. Instead I highlighted them along the bottom edge which gives them a bit of a deflated tire look. If you click through the gallery you can see the initial bad highlight and where I fixed it.

After that I painted her face. I always like to do the eyes first, since I find it easier to be messy with eyes and neat with the face than vice versa. First I shaded her eye sockets with vgc dark fleshtone with a bit of black added. Then I filled in the eyes with a combination of white and basic skintone. Then I did her irises in I think VMC flat green, her pupils in black, and a glint of light overlapping her pupils and irises in pure white.

After that I painted her face in much the same way as her legs, if a bit more carefully and with a smaller brush. I like to use little dots of glaze for blending areas like this. I also took care to make her face the brightest area of her skin, since after years of watching tutorials telling you to do this it finally sunk through my thick skull. It really does give you a better result, try it!

For her lips I combined I want to say pink and turquoise to get a purple, which I highlighted with a glint of white on her lower lip.

After the face I finished off the rest of her skin, namely her arms, breasts and decolletage. A note on her arms here, while her torso and head are about the height of a primaris marine (skinnier, due to the lack of power armor), her arms and lower legs are very long and distended. Her chicken legs are part of her bird theme/charm, but I wasn’t a big fan of her long skinny cylindrical arms. I just left them as simple cylinders.

For the breasts and decolletage, I also made them very bright to again frame and draw attention to her face. I was careful to blend as smoothly as I could here since I think rough blending would stick out like a sore thumb. You can also see that I did a sort of weird lumpy job on the bit of her sternum peaking out from the cleft in her outfit. I came back and fixed this much later on.

To finish off this section I also did her hair and eyebrows. I did a combination of vmc flat green and light turquoise highlighted pretty simply by adding white to the mix. I’ll admit it looks a bit, uh, Joker-y at this point but I think it comes together better when I start painting her various gold accouterments, which I’ll talk about in my next post.