This should be the final leg of the project before we complete it. After the tedious head dress struggle, which still needed some work, the head is compared to the body work and the disparity in skin tones needed to be brought closer, even though I think the face normally is slightly brighter for royalties with bodies exposed to the sun, the faces are sometimes sheltered. However, the disparity is great and once I finalised the muscle tones on the body and is happy, I now have to bring the tone closer to the face.
The photographing of the tones are difficult to get it right due to the use of overhead ring lamps and flash and ISO 1200 due to darkness on my desk.....so, the picture below is what we finally was able to get close to what I see. With 7 to 8 layers of careful light skin toning and dark wash back and forth to prevent the powdery look with is due to pigment breakup during glazing. I added some glazing medium to hold the pigments together otherwise, it will look patchy.
As you can see, with the toning, the body work is now closer to the face tones, and I am happy with it. Next, to fill in the rubies on the crown, I painted the balls on the resin with black, then crown them with red, then gloss varnish each ball to get the depth look like the ones on the cape.
Finally the nipples were painted in purple mixed with German Chocolate Brown leaving the tits lightly exposing the flesh colours below and glazed over with thinned down paint to give it some highlights. My wife told me that the nipples are way too purplish, so, I added more brown and glazed over it....now she is happy, at 5am in the morning, with gastric pain in my stomach, I wasn't in the best shape to pick a fight with her.The fit, unfortunately was quite bad and I did not notice earlier. The head was tilting too much downwards and the whole neck was 90% floating on air. After 3 weeks of painting, the last thing I need is to carve it again. So, I blade it slowly, cutting out the inner side of the head dress, levelling the top portion of the cape and adding a sheet of styrene at the back of the neck, cutting off some materials from the front portion...and finally, we get the head brushed with CA and attached it to the body. And I bend the sprue below the bust which I attached to assist in handling the job to angle it back about 10 degrees for the shot....looks ok. I glossed the dung beetles on the arms and we are set for waiting the crowning glory, the cobra.
One good look at it I find the neck ornament and bit glary even though I toned it down with some glazes of flesh...I will see if I can achieve the pearly look but before I do that I went through numerous photos I have taken at the Parisian Louvre and find that the red and blue looks quite authentic and decided to keep it.