Reinforcements: Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau, Part 1

So the secret was short-lived, thanks to keen-eyed reader Saint_Lupus, but here's my take on the famous Inquisitor Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau.

Let me first start by saying that I have an irrational fear of painting faces.  I always prefer helmeted models and my normal faces are lucky to have a little wash with no eyes.  While I've read and tried a lot of different approaches for eyes, I'm always afraid of the crazy-eyes or cross-eyed look.  And since I'm afraid of painting faces, I usually save it for last and end up with an otherwise good model ruined.

So for this model I was going to face my fears and paint the face and eyes first.  If it doesn't work out, I'll just strip the paint and prime him again.  No worries.

Starting off with a coat of Tallarn Flesh.  Forgive the camera work here, because of his wide-brimmed hat his face is pretty difficult to photograph without everything being over-exposed.

Next, thinned Hormagaunt Purple for shading the recesses.

Then start working up the highlights with 50-50 Tallarn Flesh and Bleached Bone and then a Bleached Bone highlight on the nose, chin and cheek bones.  I also hit the teeth with bleached bone.

Next I dab a little big of Delvin Mud in the eye sockets.  I always picture Inquisitors as sunken, but wild-eyed and gaunt individuals, so I tried to make him pretty grim looking.  I also put down some white for the eyes.

Now is the tense time for me: the eyes.  I started with a dab of green in the middle of the white and then put down a tiny dot of black in the center of the green.  The green is really dark, so you can barely tell in person, let alone in these bad pics.

Then I went back and cleaned up and smoothed out some of the highlights and added a little bit of white to his teeth and a little bit more Delvin Mud around his eye sockets.  Keep in mind I am thinning down the Delvin Mud before I apply it os as not to get too dark each time.

Phew!  The most stressful part of this model (for me) is done.  And it doesn't look completely terrible, so I can take a sigh of relief and take a break.

You can see in this final picture I also started blocking out the gear on his chest and his hair.  Since he's got a lot of detail- leather straps, pouches, bottles, flowing locks of hair and sweet sideburns, I wanted to make sense of it a little before I started on the hat and shirt.  I've found that putting a little base coat helps me to explore all the fine details and plan what I'm going to do next.  But next is the hair and shirt, so look for those in Part 2.