Marvel: Crisis Protocol

I didn’t capture it in the photos at all, by X-23 marks the first time in my life where I actually put pupils in the eyes of a model. Which now that I type that I realize I probably need to revisit Lockjaw and Hulk. In the past I’ve tried like crazy to ignore eyes for a number of reasons. 1. I actually think it’s a level of detail you don’t really see on a person until they are fairly close to you, so when working with models that are this scale I don’t think it makes sense to go into that kind of detail on their eyes unless the model has enlarged eyes at that scale (like Lockjaw and Hulk). 2. It’s a massive pain trying to make it look right and who wants to spend a bunch of time trying to do that? So I’ve always taken the lazy way out and done some kind of shading in the eye area and left it at that. Later when I was following a guide on painting Enchantress they did this clever trick of painting black in the eye area, cleaning up with flesh around it, then putting in a dot of white. It worked really well for Enchantress because having her eyes glow works really well for her character.

It works less well for a character like X-23 and that became obvious when my wife pointed out that her eyes looked like they were glowing. My wife is very tactful about giving feedback because when I’m proud of finishing a model I can be a big baby about negative feedback (she really is a saint for putting up with me). but she was right. I needed to do something about the eyes now that they had the black “eyeshadow” and the white dot in the middle. So I decided to break my rule and put in pupils. It was my first attempt and honestly I think I nailed it. I should probably gets pics taken of it to add to the blog. Here’s a closeup pic of her to see what I’m talking about. Not bad for a first time.