Infinity Speculo Killer, AKA Commission Giveaway Contest WIP

 Like the title says, this is a work-in-progress update on the Infinity Speculo Killer that the winner of the Commission Giveaway Contest I ran a little while back had shipped to me to paint up.

 Before I get to that, though, a little summary of what I've been up to: our one-year-old son is now over his bout with pneumonia, none the worse for wear, and has added four more molars to his collection of baby teeth in the past few weeks. He's also managed to gain some weight with all this going on, so in short, he's healthy and our family's doing better. I finally got a chance to do something(s) I've been meaning to do ever since my birthday last August - clean up my painting area and build a new, narrower spray booth (cheap and easy and made out of cardboard and a shop vac, but still). I got a chance to do both of those these past few days, and actually took a first stab at painting via airbrush - no, not on the Speculo Killer, but on another figure for a competition over at the RelicNews Tabletop Painting & Modeling Forum. It's a GW Plaguebearer, and it now has a flesh basecoat - I figgered I'd take a stab with airbrushing with a Plaguebearer because even if I completely maul the painting, it'll still look good! (I'm breaking in the airbrush for a secondary commission I'm working on, and it ought to make basecoating the massive skin areas much, much easier and quicker.) Oh, and I don't have to serve jury duty as I was thinking I might - I got called off, so my weekdays are now my own again.

 That update of sorts out of the way, here's the Speculo Killer prepped, assembled, and pinned on her permanent display base! (Just ignore the bottle cap - it's not the base you're looking for...) I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had a pin vise drill bit actually small enough to fit within the socket of her monofilament sword arm wrist and even better, that I had something of a narrow enough gauge to glue in for a pin to keep her sword hand from loosening. The display base she's on is going to have a puddle of thick oil dripping out of the exposed piping that will look like it's pooling around the flat top of the slottabase that the concrete round sits on. Adding the liquid can wait until after the rest of the painting is done - I feel that sort of thing looks much better if everything else is painted and highlighted and then any semi-transparent liquids are applied over the top.

 By way of the current paintjob, just her bodysuit is fully basecoated and in an "alternating" pattern of sorts - looking at the figure after priming, I decided that the exposed scalp behind her face mask and her arm with jutting armor spikes might look best in some sort of flesh tone since there's enough open area to have a "triangle" of similar color to balance things out. I'm to understand the Speculo Killer in game background terms is a shape-shifting assassin, and so I think playing this up by way of contrasting "shifting" skin areas and a bodysuit covering the rest will look better than an even color of some sort all round (it also helps that the texture of the areas in question seems slightly different, which I didn't really see clearly until after I primed the figure.)

Here she is, in her current work-in-progress glory:

 I'm also working on a lava-themed display base to cover the large plastic sheet stock oval blank I posted a picture of not too long ago. I'm trying to evenly juggle two commissions simultaneously for the sake of fairness, on top of everything else, even though one is technically "free" via the Giveaway Contest. Pictures of the lava base should be going up soonish, time and luck willing - I need to finish detailing it first, as well as sculpting over gaps I've been filling on the massively diabolical figure that goes with the base.