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| Ragal Gair, Champion of The Fleet |
So there he finally stands, the Red Corsair Ragal Gair, Champion of the Fleet, the harvester of skulls. The hulking armour, seasoned and stained by the time and blood, gleams in deep red. Moist, freshly picked trophy skulls, pierced by the thorns of the shoulder guard, make a macabre altar of victory, drawing fat hungry flies to feast. The grotesquelly shaped power hook, in place of an arm lost long ago in a fierce boarding fight, whispers quiet hissing sounds when it moves in the will of its master...
Ragal Gair's painting process took me almost a week to finish, eating almost all of my freetime. I have to thank my wife for her understanding as all I could think was to finish this up before the end of the week. Sometimes I get pretty deep when I start something...
Ok, some thoughts about the final stages. I decided to change the direction of the head at the last minute. The final posture is now somewhat more alert and a bit more balanced.
Now some of you might notice that the familiar black and red colour scheme of the Red Corsairs is in Gair's case much more dominated by the vivid red. There's still some hints of black here and there, in bolt pistol and in tilting shield to name the few.
My main inspiration for the colour scheme came from this John Blanche's Red Corsair painting...
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| Red Corsair by venerable John Blanche |
I tried to capture the vivid reds of the painting for my Corsair. I primed the whole armour with dark red and brown, adding a layer of red, highlighting with orange and yellows and finally gaving the whole thing a nice shiny layer of orange ink. I almost ruined the whole process by adding a layer of mat varnish on top of the paintjob, as the varnish ate all the gleam and vibrant shades of the armour that made it so vibrant in the first place. Fortunately, I was able to fix my error by gently repeating the process, excluding the mat varnish, of course ;)
Here's some more angles of the finished Red Corsair...
I decided to keep the backpack as it was, as modificating it afterwards felt quite laborious.
Vivid red was pretty unforgivingly hard to capture in to photos, like many before me have witnessed. That dark backdrop didn't help it a bit. In the end, I was able to adjust my camera to get decent shots that where the colour balance was acceptable for the post-processing.
Finally some close-ups...
So 1/3 finished and two more to go. I've already started planning the next one but it'll take some time before I have anything substantial to show you. Hmm, maybe it is time to get back to Punk Moth project...
- Kari
