Lady Death Fanart Collectible: Part 6 Polypaint and base
Hi, it’s time to share with you another part of the process to create this fanart piece.
Polypaint
As this is my first collectible fanart I didn’t have previous experience with polypaint so I tried my best and played a bit with it.I wanted to give a ghostly and eerie look to Lady Death, she is beautiful and deadly, but at the end of the day she is a woman that died and was reborn at hell as an avenging spirit, that’s why I gave her skin tone a bluish very cold tone.As you will see I gave myself some creative freedom to deviate from the traditional color scheme that this characater has in comics and illustrations.To add a bit of sensuality by painting some freckles on the face and the chest.
The dark nature of this character was the perfect excuse to gave her a kind of goth make up, very dark shadows around the eyes, blue lips and fingernails. I know that the original character includes sexy red lips but I wanted this girl to have a sexy but at the same time creepy look, that’s why we can see some thin veins emanating from her eyes.
The biggest chromatic change I did for this character is at the hair. Lady Death has a characteristic white weavy hair but in my fanart I decided to gave her a very saturated blue color.The reason behind this wasn’t only an aesthetic choice. I want that the face area strongly pulls the attention of the viewer so this area needed a stronger contrast. Another reason is that I want her to have a more modern look, as I mentioned before, I’m strongly attracted to women with goth/punk look.
I gave myself half an hour or more to analyse the work of experienced sculptors that create collectibles and I discovered that the use of darker values on the skin is often applied to create a greater sense of volume and three-dimensionality. I found that areas with heavy ambient occlusion are the perfect places to paint with darker colors in order to increase the separation between different forms.
Even though she has a bluish skin tone, I used a bit of warmer hues in areas that, in real life, tend to go towards red and pink, this is very obvious in the nose, cheeks, and knuckles. Thinking with a logical mind it’s completely absurd to have warmer tones on the body of a zombie like creature but I didn’t want to limit myself by using only blue tones, it looks boring and artificial. In real life these colors are created by blood vessels in areas where the skin is very thin.
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Scythe
**for her weapon I applied a cool gray with some warmer variations, this color scheme is influenced by the work of H.R giger.
Base
I’d like to talk about the design for the base which, to be honest, I forgot to develop along with the character.My main idea with the base is to show that Lady Death inhabits a very sterile and arid land, at the end of the day she is at hell.You can see a that she walks over dirt and rocks, a sign that she’s surrounded by death and loneliness.
As part of the landscape we can see some bones and skulls to reinforce the idea of lack of living creatures, yet we can see three hands that try to reach her legs.This hands represent that all creatures are subordinated to her power and seek an evil blessing with a simple touch of the princess of the damned.1- The hand with skin burns represents the souls of those who are newcomers to hell, tortured souls that suffer for the sins comitted on earth.2- The hand with greenish rotten skin and pustules is the reminder of the decay that has infected the souls of those who have been trapped and have forgotten their humanity3- Last but not least, the hand of a demon shows that even dark creatures and entities bow before her presence.
The cherry on the top, at least in my vision, are the simese twins that emerge from the ground, this malevolent creatures remind us that in hell there’s only perversion and any trace of innocence is lost.
Thanks for reading till this pointI’m really happy to be very close to finish this creative journey, last but not least it’s mandatory to talk about splitting the sculpture in several pieces to be printed, this will be my last entry before showing the final rendered images.
See yaMay Zbrush be with you
