Aesthetics of March 2014, vol 2

Well, it happens that I did manage to paint both of these heads during the weekend :D Both of my customers were very active and replied to my preview pictures very quickly, allowing me to finish them both in just two and a half days. It also helped that both of the clients asked for pretty much natural face-ups and I could use the same base colours for blushing, saving me time in blending and not having to clean brushes in the middle. Whew, I think Kun was my last natural coloured face-up that I have done? At first I missed the clear pastels XD but then when I was finishing this Regen head, I remembered how pretty natural face-ups can be :3



Both of these were a bit tricky to do... The first one, Luts Regen, had residue from a previous face-up that I needed to do something about to cover it. And if that wasn't enough challenge, the sculpt itself needed some careful applying so that the result looks smooth and nice.

See some sculpts have these really sharp corners, as in the lower lid is sculpted to have a bit of an eye-bag, or the inner corner of the upper lid is really deep (like with the Ringdoll head, I'll get to that later). It makes it more difficult to draw lashes (you can't just do them rapidly, or the lash will break in the middle; you have to draw/paint them rather slowly, so that you can follow that curve) and apply blush evenly. With the Regen head, the left eye is actually rather smooth and very easy to blush. The right one, however... It has a sharper eye-bag, and to top it off, the outer corner of the upper lid had these edges, which tend to draw pastels like crazy, making little lines where there should be none. But I managed it :D Mostly because I know what to look out for...

Btw, Regen is a nice head, even with these assymetries. Those lips are gorgeous! I loved blushing that mouth. Also, it has a very cute profile. Too bad the nose is a bit too wide from the front and 3/4 profile for my tastes, or else I'd be getting this head myself :D And actually the asymmetries kinda just tell that the head is hand-sculpted. With 3D modeling, there shouldn't be these kinds of 'errors'. It gives the doll character, imo.

Now, the Ringdoll... I hate it that there was some black pastels stuck into the inner corner of the left eye >_> I just couldn't get it out... That thing is like a black hole! (Pun intended.) The rest of the face-up I'm actually pretty pleased with, including the stubble of a beard.

I was given Snow Villiers as a reference character for that face-up and although it is done in my style, when the wig (which is blond and shaggy like Snow's) is on, the actually is some resemblance :D Even with one being a doll and the other very realistically rendered pixel dude. I always fear doing beards, but I also welcome the challenge. I just worry that they'll end up looking like a razor-wire across the chin, with the hair strokes too visible, or just random dirt splatter, if the hair is too scarce... But I did this one is several takes, with progress photos sent to the client at major steps, the first being just the base blushing without sealing so that she could decide whether the beard was a good call. It apparently was, because she liked it :)

Now the comission list is empty (or is if I don't count Velvet's incoming bird), and I can just wait for the next challenge :3