City of Ash Terrain Piece 2

I have a tray of these primed scatter pieces from the City of Ash box that work great as a little cleanser project. Also, as like a nice way to jump back into painting after getting distracted by other hobbies (who knew starting a BG3 multiplayer campaign with the homies would be all consuming haha). Anyways, breaking into down into photography and painting again to share some of my experience with this piece.

Photography:
Wanted to try using just a simple black background this time. I felt parts of using my backdrop books were distracting from the subject I was trying to emphasize. Also I couldn't find a backdrop from the books I have that I thought fit this scene (should've just used a book inside!) so there's that. I have my flash and umbrella set-up about 3 ft from my scene with two kicker LED lights and a light overhead to give me some autofocus help. Used the foam boards again to try to balance out my lighting a bit. I think the white board was definitely helpful in that regard. I'm starting to experiment more with balance the light from the flash and the other scene lighting using my camera settings and that's been pretty fun. Got this grass mat that I used in my last project and stacked it on top of some styrofoam to make this little hill. Can't really see it in the photos, but I thought it worked nicely to give me some layers to the image.

Painting:
So first off, an explanation. I realize the final photo has a total different icon lol. What had happened was....that was a WIP shot and I had just put on that decal and I was super excited because it was the biggest decal I had done. Then I got impatient during the process and accidentally tore it off. I liked that icon better than what I ended up with (they give you two copies and I messed up both T_T) but I guess it still worked out all right. Anyways, didn't really have a plan going in to this one. I started with a quick drybrush of white over a black primer and then went to town mixing with some of the PA expert acrylics I got a while ago. I watched a Roman Lappat video encouraging improving skills in color mixing so I wanted to try. Once I got mostly off-grey values I used the PA 1step dark blue black for all the shadows. Holy heck batman, that color specifically is so useful for that for quickly glazing on a shadow color. I wish I had paid more attention to the mixes with the expert acrylics so I could easily mix that with the 1step, but c'est la vie. For the rest of the areas (skeleton, ropey bits, ground) I just slapped on some more 1step colors (graphite grey, yellow, warm brown, shadow flesh) and refined a bit here and there to get to this point. Worked a tiny bit more with my Gilded Goblin sables and I love these brushes the more I use them.

Phew! If you read my little novela there you are a champion, a scholar, and I sincerely appreciate you. For those readers, I'd love a comment about lore (from anywhere) that has inspired you recently. I guess like a story in whatever setting is what I'm thinking. Of course other comments are wholly welcomed.

Thanks for stopping by!