Painting my first bust!

Over the last two years since I got back into the hobby I’ve painted several hundred minis and have slowly but steadily improved my painting skills. I thought it would be fun to test my painting skills by doing something I’ve never done before, painting a 1/10th scale bust.

For my first attempt I didn’t feel like purchasing a pricy high end bust, because I wasn’t quite sure whether my painting chops would be up to the challenge. I did a bit of looking around online and found a decent looking second-hand bust made of cast alabaster (ground up stone mixed with a resin). The bust is a copy of the famous Diana/Artemis of Versaille, a Roman marble statue that is thought to be a copy of a Greek original in bronze that is now lost. Analysis of paint residues on classical statues has shown that these originally were not the white colour they are today, but were often painted in very bright (and garish) colours. It therefore seemed fitting for my first bust to be a copy of a classical statue.

To give myself the best possible shot at this I also purchased a wet palette. I was a bit worried beforehand that my paint would not adhere particularly well to the cast alabaster material. However, giving the statue a good clean in soapy water and a coat of grey Vallejo spray primer seemed to be all that was needed for the paint to adhere properly.

Following a painting guide on Youtube I started on the skin, gradually layering my way up from brown to a pale skin tone. After about eight hours of this the end result looked absolutely horrible and nothing like the guide. So I then tried another approach, again from a Youtube painting guide. This time I started with a light skin colour and used darker glazes to add shadows and colour differentiation on the skin. This again didn’t look particularly great, so in the end I settled on this mostly monochrome skin tone with only the vaguest hint of a pinkish colour on the cheeks.

What I am quite happy with is the dress (the bright lamps hide a lot of the painted highlights, though) and the eyes. The eyes in particular are a vast improvement over the panicked deer-in-headlights stare of the legionary I painted back in 2020. So, all in all this is not a terrible result. I’ve a lot more to learn still, but it’s clear that I’ve made some real progress in the last two years. Perhaps I’ll paint another bust in a year or so, and see if I’ve learned some more!

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