Air Elemental & Drow

Had a bit of insomnia last night, so I did some late-night painting and got the Air Elemental and six Drow warriors finished.

Here is the Air Elemental.

Pretty happy with him.  His body is a pear glued upside down (smaller side down towards the base) to give him the "volume" look to his body that a small twister/tornado should have I think.  His arms and "neck" are split eggs, and his shoulder mini tornadoes are axle caps, as is his head.  Because he is supposed to be a swirling air mass, I wanted lots of round shapes in this construction, but I wanted him to have a recognizable, but noticeably incomplete, humanoid appearance.  Sort of like a non-material plane being "playing" at being a material plane creature and just not quite getting it right.

In terms of painting, I actually did him first with much lighter colors, but it just lacked depth.  I wanted the feeling of a really "dark" and dangerous "inner" part to him, just like a real tornado.  So I went really stark with the colors, a very dark blue base color, a light blue swirl on top of that, and a white swirl on top of that.  All in all, I'm pretty happy with the result.

And now, the Drow ...

Before I start, these guys turned out WAY better than I thought they would.  All I could think of when I was doing them was, "ho-hum, another elf figure ... ugh, how boring."  Well, I was way wrong.

As you can see I made three with short sword and buckler, and three with hand crossbow and buckler.  I'm really happy with the build and the paint job both.  The build was nothing new except I used slightly larger tile spacers for their arms so that I could have more of a "billowing" shirt sleeve look, and also it let me trim them so that the arm and the hand are all one piece, always a good thing for durability purposes.  The hand crossbow I made with only one mistake, so that's pretty good.  I had made bows before, but not crossbows.  Turned out to be very easy to cute one tile spacer to the shape of the crossbow, and glue it on top of the tilespacer arm/hand holding it.  All the details were just done with the paint job.

Speaking of the paint job, the dark gray skin tone with the eyes really gives the "evil" appearance I had hoped for.  Like I said, I was dreading doing these guys, and when it was all said and done, they are some of my favorite humanoid figures I've done to day.  The only thing you can't really see in these pictures very well is that for the hair, I first painted on a light gray color for the hair, and then went over it with white, leaving some of the light gray uncovered on the end of the hair shape to give it some depth. 

Painting a Flesh Golem right now, but I have to do some reading for the D&D game I'm running tonight, so I'm not sure if I will get him done until later this week.

--Matt