Bushido Puppetmaster

Greetings all, today we can take a look at a model from one of the best new companies around. GCT Studios Bushido Puppetmaster.

GCT's sculpting is just beautiful, so finely cut. Their choice of subjects are really unusual and inspired by the coolest elements of oriental myth and legend. This fellow is joining my RPG models as a Shugenja - an Oriental Adventures wizard of sorts - with a speciality in summoning and mind control. When I was contemplating colour schemes for him I knew that I wanted turquoise in there somewhere but finding the other colours was more problematic. Look at the figure again, colour scheme works right? Now read out the colours: Turquoise, pink and orange. Would you have thought they went together? Neither did I until I broke out the trusty colour wheel.

Now a normal "Contrasting" colour scheme would pair turquoise with a reddish-orange. But I needed a second colour as edging. Thus I went with what is called a "Split-Complementary" scheme. This takes the two colours either side of the contrast colours and by using BOTH of them creates a balanced effect. Take a look at the small discs on the right. 'A' is just turquoise and orange, it sort of works but not as well as the blue-orange scheme (the teeny ones). 'B' adds the pink into the mix and suddenly the scheme works... go figure!

Another facet to consider was that there were essentially two figures in one model. I needed the female figure made of smoke to stand out clearly. Much like the harlequins I decided to do this with textural contrast, bright vs desaturated, chalky vs smooth. I also warmed up the usual skin tone by adding some Bronzed Fleshtone to the Tallarn Flesh. This helped it to stand out against the cold blue-grey of the smoke.

She is my favourite part of this figure, the sculpting is gorgeous and very feminine without being OTT. The smoke was painted first with a basecoat of Shadow Grey and Codex Grey mix and then highlighted with increasing amounts of Astronomicon Grey.

One more view of the smoke-girl, this time from the back! The other colours were fairly basic, Macharius Solar Orange with a Gryphonne Sepia wash for the orange. Hawk Turquoise washed with a mix of Thraka Green and Asurman Blue for the tunic. The pink needed to be quite soft, Dheneb Stone mixed with Red Gore and a Baal Red wash did the job nicely. I initially intended to do a whole bunch of freehanding on the clothing, once I started painting I decided that the sculpting should speak for itself.

The puppet was a really cute feature. It comes without any points of attachment to the hand and will look just fine without any connections. It would look like very thin string, invisible at this scale. I, however, wanted to attach strings to give another level of detail to the model. Mercifully I am good with knots and handy with a pair of tweezers!

That is the lot for this time. The Oriental RPG group is going to consist of this guy, a pair of old citadel dwarfs (one ninja, one samurai!) and another GCT model, the Bushido Sumo! He's going to be statted as a monk as the most appropriate class I could think of. Until next time then.

TTFN