Elemental Forces III

In the past week, I finally completed my Bones Earth Elemental project. The way was not without obstacles, but I am pretty happy with the results, and I would dearly love to get this beastie onto the table in an RPG scenario of some kind.

I set up the design and color scheme in my previous posts. To finish the project, I focused on details. Along the way, I also continued to shade and highlight the model with increasingly pale and yellowish colors to build on the sandstone theme.

The most prominent accent details are the angular crystals protruding from the elemental's body at various points, most notably at the elbows. There are also several that I sculpted onto its base to help tie things together. When designing the color scheme, had selected a gold-yellow palette for most of the stone and earth. I selected a deep blue as a pleasing complement to that scheme.

Along the way, I found and cleaned up a number of mold lines on the model. I still can't claim to have achieved perfect quality, but I think I reached "good", and certainly "good enough". Bones make this process simultaneously easier and harder: On the one hand, I find filing and removal of mold lines more difficult in Bonesium than with metal or resin.

The crystals you see are painted entirely with a mix of "prussian blue" and white paint. I simply mixed things back and forth to achieve the desired effect. The shade is not precisely what I had originally planned, but I think it works, and the effect does draw the eye.

I complained about the model's lack of eyes in the past. Painting a "face" onto a mini adds a focal point and can help to sell a piece visually, even if it is not truly human. In the end, I decided to take my crystal color mix and attempt to paint some thin, glowing, slits into the gap between the stones of the elemental's ersatz-face. It's not quite as eye-catching as might be ideal, but it works.

Another touch I added in the finishing process was vegetation. I thought some clumps of grass along the dirt base and clinging to the surface of the rock pile would make the whole thing look a bit more "natural", and again help to tie the unnatural humanoid elemental form into the more natural looking dirt and rock base.

A few touch ups, and some light green highlights for the grass, and I declared the whole thing done. Now I just need to find an excuse to use it.