Frost Giant 77106 WIP

[Marineal]

I'd love to see some more on how you did your snow. Its fantastic, the depth you managed to add makes me jealous. :)

[Slashhamster]

I'd love to see some more on how you did your snow. Its fantastic, the depth you managed to add makes me jealous. :)

It was a lot of trial and error.

 

Roughly, the steps were the following:

1. Lay down a large generous coat of Liquitex flexible modeling paste (you can see this first step earlier in the WIP).
2. Let that sit for a day to dry.  It shrinks some while drying.
3. Take a look at the dried paste, frown, add more in areas where I wanted to build it up further.
4. Let that sit and dry.
5. Go back to step 3 another 3 or 4 times.
6. Once I had the snow mostly built up right, I used a small file to smooth out brush strokes, and remove any wierd peaks left by the paste.

After I had reached this point, I coated all of the snow with a couple of generous layers of Reaper brush on sealer.  I was using this to further smooth out any rough areas.  After this was dry, I covered it with a layer of pearl white paint to get a sparkling effect.  This turned out terrible, and was completely painted over.

 

I went back in with the modeling paste to cover up the pearl white, and realized that thinning down the paste with water actually works quite well, so I started using it in a similar fashion as what I had tried to do with the brush on sealer.  I dabbled watered down paste in various places and let gravity do it's thing to help smooth things out.  Since I was going for a somewhat melting snow look, this trick worked quite well.  I repeated this a few more times, again letting stuff dry in between.

 

Once it was finally ready for paint, I covered it entirely with a base coat of...a color I can't tell you because it was an MSP Sample.    It was very close to Ghost White though (slightly greyer).  I suspect it was an off batch of ghost white actually.  I then went back in with glazes and washes of Winter Blue and Gem Purple.  These were thinned very heavily.  After that, it was just a matter of continuing to glaze in the MSP sample color, and pure white, to bring back the highlights, and smooth out areas where the blue/purple were too strong.

 

When the painting was done, I used some realistic water and dabbled it around with a cheapy brush.  Mostly on the bottom layer, and anywhere I felt like the snow would have melted more significantly and turned to water/ice.  This doesn't really show in the pictures, but is more obvious in hand.  Lastly, I attempted to make some icicles with water effects (thicker than realistic water, opaque, but dries mostly clear).  This didn't really work (due to my execution, not the material).   So instead I just used a toothpick with some water effects on the tip, and applied it carefully to places I thought icicles would be, and pulled downwards.  This again is almost impossible to see in the photos.  It didn't quite realize my idea of icicles, but it still looks like places where snow has started to melt and turn to ice.  I suspect with better execution on my part, the icicles would have looked wonderful.

 

 

The snow was a fun challenge, and early on I was worried it was going to look like he was standing on a pile of frosting, but I'm happy with how it turned out.  As someone who has spent most of his life in Southern California, snow is not something I see a lot of, so it's fun to see it come to life on a small scale.

[optimusprimer]

Your frost giant looks amazing and I really am digging that base !