I'm sure you're all quite sick of this by now

Even though I liked my last attempt better than the first (sort of), I still wasn't happy with Avelarion and since he's one of my favorite characters I decided I just could not ignore the issue and pretend things were okay. I just didn't enjoy looking at him and I kept trying to come up with reasons why but in the end it was actually the yellows.

His face was too yellow and it just kept making me think it looked unhealthy so this time I decided I was going to use mostly reds and pinks with a little bit of blue and yellow and do way less contour blushing.

Here is a picture of just the head outside before i got around to gloss and such. Mainly here because I couldn't get a decent detail shot indoors. I need to set up an area with good, controlled lighting.

 This time I am finally ACTUALLY happy with it instead of just trying to convince myself I am. I want to try to rig up some other way of attaching his crest, in fact, because I will not be able to remove it without ruining his face up if I just hot glue it on like I normally do.

Also at some point I really need to finish smoothing out his hands and airbrushing them to match him. And I need to move past prototype stage on his ears.

happy mistakes(?)

Right after my natural lighting shot of Avelarion's new face up last time, I managed to overdo it on the hot glue and ruin half of one his eyebrows. This forced me to wipe the head I wasn't sure I liked anyway and redo it.

Today after work I set out to fix his face and attempt to do something I'd be happier with this time.

I limited my colors to only four to try to avoid the muddying the face suffered from last time. Sadly that still happened somewhat thanks to the sealant, but overall I'm less displeased than before. I think more dramatic face ups just aren't my comfort zone.

my new dremel bit

A bit ago I found this buffing and finishing bit for a dremel and the picture with it showed someone smoothing out wood with it. I thought it might be handy for smoothing out mods I'd been working on and save the effort of sanding by hand.

Well, I tested it on resin and it actually sands the area down. I guess resin is less tough than wood so that makes some sense. What I did realize I could do with it was sand things down for modifications much more smoothly than with my normal dremel bits.

So let's backtrack a bit. After doing Deidara's mods I decided I wanted to update Sasori as well, and a bit ago I took a picture into photoshop to see what I'd have to do to make it work okay. It seemed like potentially more trouble than the head was worth so I only got as far as marking the areas I'd want to sand down and then set the head aside.

But with the new dremel bit in hand, I figured the worst case scenario was that I destroyed a head I was considering just ditching anyway, so I might as well test this on it and see if I couldn't attempt to pursue the mods I'd had in mind.

After some sanding, his cheeks are definitely significantly slimmer than before. It is now probably safe to start on additive mods like making the eyes smaller.

After that I decided to grab my Leon Kennedy Minimee who has been sitting around collecting dust. In person he just felt far too flat. And that would be fine for certain types of characters who are supposed to be more stylized (such as Sasori and Deidara here) but the features he did have just didn't mesh with that flatness.

So I grabbed him and decided to go in and define his brow and cheeks more.

I didn't even bother to wipe his face first, as you can see. I figured I could use the places I'd attempted to blush in structure as guidelines for actually carving it in. I am relatively pleased with the results so far.

BONUS! Natural lighting shot of Avelarion's face up. His head feathers came off when I tried to sit him down on the chair. This resulted in some mild face up chipping but that part won't be visible once I put it back on anyway so not the end of the world.