Paint: The beauty of the Sea

Rough but working

As promised, and without further ado, I start with the primed version of the scene:

Not too bad, it somehow works, although the greenstuff jellyfish is a bit rough. Let’s see if paint can hide that.

Don’t Ruin the Prime-Job

Then let’s go! No Fear - although I always fear to make the scene worse with the first brushstrokes - especially from the light setting created by the airbrush. The only thing that helps: thick paint and fast sketching - at least for the environment.
I limited it to mainly 2 colors: Yellow and blue. A little purple to desaturate the yellow here and there, and black and white - mainly mixed in for the rocks.

Still rough, but OK. Next step: Jellyfish.

If that works out, the rest isn’t so important. It should become the main focus. Bright and colourful. Colour wise I still kept the blue and purple plus a big amount of magenta! If you look closely, there is a transition from turquoise on the lower parts getting to a bright grey on the top. Everything applied in a a stripe pattern. Then on top there is the second pattern, stippled and painted from a deep red to bright magenta.
Looks cool! Ok - the image of that stage is quite blurry. It’s tricky to take pictures with proper focus on deeper scenes.

Under the sea - Only with the sea!

To understand the scene it is important that the viewer immediately grasps that the whole thing is under the sea. But for me it seemed not to be that obvious. I didn't plan to fill that beast with resin, but I thought that a backdrop could be a visual key to get that idea immediately. There are beautiful underwater backdrops on instagram as reference.
I did start again with a brushstroke pattern from dark to bright on a piece of plastic card. Color wise it is still the same bottles or tubes. Violett in the dark, towards blue and some yellow to get the turquoise. Together with some painted details on the ground, the combined scene has a whole different impact.

Fixing visual stumbling blocks

Before I actually started the astronaut, there was an issue with his cart that annoyed me.

The back had a gap where the ends of the metal parts came together. Such a thing doesn’t exist on a real sardine tin. Although the flaw is little and most people wouldn’t ever notice, it was stuck in my head.

After long thoughts, I chose toothpaste to fix it. Not the real one. But there is the super-glue-toothpaste-mimic, which is perfectly positioned for spill over. A rubber band from the garden, super glue and patience made the toothpaste. Plus a tiny bit of acrylic paste for the tip. Believe me or not - it did relax me massively to have that little issue out of my head (-:

Go Go - Cart

When you look at the primed version of the cart or sardine tin, it looks quite chaotic. There is much visual noise and it is hard to distinguish the individual items.
So proper value has to be painted and make it “readable” againand proper alternating with bright and dark colour.
That’s easy, but choosing hues is not. The Jellyfish drags the viewers eye and it is planned as main focus. Second focus should be the Astronaut and lastly the cart.
For the Astronaut I chose a bright saturated orange. It is the complement color to the blue background that should raise visual attention. A strong dark separation lines give him a coimc look.

The jellyfish influenced the whole scene with it's magenta. The lens of the astronaut reflects it in the front and slight magenta glazes were added here and there in the environment.

The garbage in the cart was tricky because the items have some colours assigned in our brain from real life. But I didn’t want to make it a box of candy and thus desaturated all colors with a blueish grey.

There were also some freehands to do… The easy one: Dots on the dice. The harder one: Logo of the sardines and the end boss: the toothpaste.
Sure, the toothpaste logo simple, but it’s glued in the middle of stuff that made it hard to keep a steady hand.

Self made Barnacles

Now putting everything together I felt the rocky area of the scene was a bit too clean. And since the sea is full of barnacles it was quite clear that I needed these in the scene!
By chance I grabbed some pearls from my daughter's craft box and fixed them with acrylic paste.
First on a bottle cap, then in the scene. Looked quite funny but thats what barnacles do. The most tricky aspect was to put them in random directions in the wobbly acrylic paste and of course the bravery to add something again on the already painted environment.

How to glue that wobbly thing?

Since I kept the jellyfish, it’s trunk, the cart and base separated, now it was time to go all in and glue it.
I put everything in place and started with the trunk. Thats because the cart had some flexibility in positioning relative to it, but the trunk has to be properly set.
Then, the the jellyfish was fixed with milliput on the trunk. After that had dried, I used some UV resin to hide that mess. The resin could be painted in the inside and nobody could see that funny construct ( Although that was anyway not really visible unless turning the whole block upside down.). After a few days I realized it was a bad idea - or just bad executed. Why? You’ll see in a minute.

Final shots

So here are the final shots of the finished piece. First time with FokusStacking - Something I have to invest a bit more time in future but i makes really a difference getting everything mostly in fokus on minis that have some depth.

Plainries Kitbash challenge

Drummroll... I did receive a special award "Environmental Awareness". That emphasizes how great Richard manage the challenge and how much passion he puts in it, because he introduced 2 additional prices beside 1st to 3rd just because of the cool entries. Also the Facebook group showed alot of love for the topic and everybody appreciated each step in everybodys work.

Have a look at the gallery and see yourself.

And the trophy is just amazing - a trophy to build your self for a kitbash challenge! Hillarious.

Uncured Uv Resin

Now the little guy sat two weeks in the shelf and suddenly I saw some weird reflection on it.
Tracing it back it seems that uncured resin sneaked it’s way out of the jelly fish. Either I did not cure long enough or the layer was too thick? No clue. It will be fixed with color soon and I learned another lesson (-: