Firepeaks Dwarf Bust

What a ride this one has been... this is my very first competition piece and if I'm being honest with myself, I could've done better, but I've run out of time and at 16.5 hours down, I'm ready to look at literally anything else.

I printed this guy back at the start of September, when I first started prepping for ScaleACT, which is this weekend (7/8 November). It took me a couple of weeks to get a proper start on it, between doing lighting concept sketches on my iPad, priming it white, and good old fashioned procrastination.

On 26 September, I got my first real start on it by airbrushing a base coat for the skin tone and hitting the whole thing with inks to establish my lighting scheme. Little did I know, doing that would mean I struggled to do anything else on it for several weeks. It wasn't until nearly 3 weeks later (mid-October) that I started trying to put paint down but it didn't look like I'd even done anything, at which point I sought feedback and was given the suggestion to just cover the entire thing with black contrast paint because all the bright tones were making it impossible for me to establish my value structure.

So, I did that and then things really started coming together. Unfortunately, by that time we were into the last two weeks of October and I've been crunch-timing it since. I finally decided yesterday that we were done and that I was going to varnish the whole thing. Little did I know, that would pull up the paint in several spots where I clearly hadn't been dilligent enough with the primer... so I had to reprime those (black this time) and paint back over it. But... now we're done.

Despite this model fighting me every step of the way, I learned a lot from it and one of those things is not to leave it until 3 weeks before the competition to get a proper start (though I'm far from the only one guilty of this), probably don't prime my model in straight white because I'll be forever chasing unpainted bits and may struggle to establish my values structure if I don't start from my darkest colours, and finally that I am capable of sticking with a project even when it is frustrating the heck out of me non-stop.

I've been painting 2D for over 20 years and took up miniatures a year ago, and I don't think I've ever spent this long on any one piece. Overall, I'm happy with it and the things I've learned from doing it and I think that's the most important thing.

Sculpt by Mammoth Factory Games
Printed at home on an Elegoo Mars 5 Ultra @ 30um in Elegoo ABS-like V2.0
Time taken:

- Planning: 1 hour 15 minutes
- Prepping (sanding, gap filling, etc): 1 hour, 3 minutes
- Painting and Varnishing: 14 hours, 12 minutes
- Total: 16 hours, 30 minutes
Paints:
- Pro-Acryl
- Vallejo Game/Model Color
- OP Paints
Brushes:
- Neef 225 sables
- Neef 970 taklon brushes
- Rosemary & Co series 33 sables