Day 264

Back to pokemon. I last left the model maybe 95% complete. I still had to make the water guns. I thought about maybe making them a hollow horn but eventually settled on a tube made from four plates. As I was building it, the tube changed from a circular one to more rectangular. The end result is what you see above.

Then it was on to painting. The back shell is orange which fades to white as a homage to the original drawing. Then I drew in lighter and darker orange lines on each shell plate. I wasn't super happy with how that turned out. It looks ok from afar but not too great up close.

The belly is obviously yellow and the rest of the body is blue. Since I wanted this to look realistic, I had to make the color transition between different parts looks natural by fading into one another. Going from yellow to blue wasn't that bad but there were some areas that went from blue to white that didn't look right. So there I had to fade the blue to yellow and then to white. I used the yellow to emphasize larger creases on the arms, legs and neck. Then I colored in some of the fine gaps in between the scales. I was going to add in another  layer of lighter blue but I was happy with what I had and just stuck with painting yellow on top of one blue layer.

The head didn't have the big scale pattern sculpted in so I just did my own thing there with the yellow. I wasn't sure what to color the knobs on the top of the head. Other colors didn't look right so I stuck with yellow. At first the eyes were more normal looking but the white just stood out too much. So I made it grayer but that didn't look natural. Since sea turtle eyes are more or less all black, I just cranked up the darkness.