I was asked to paint this model again shortly after finishing the first one and my initial inclination was to say no. The first one had taken far longer than I was expecting and I just wanted to paint a few simple things afterwards to give me a bit of a break. I gave it a bit more thought though and remembered that there were a few times when I was conflicted about how to paint certain parts and was never sure if I went the right way. I decided that it might be fun to go back and do things slightly differently and see just which the better ideas were. Whilst the customer wanted this version to be very similar to the first he did allow me to make most of the alterations I wanted.

The first thing I really wanted to change were the metal parts, on #1 they were meant to look like oxidized copper, I like how the effect turned out but I wondered how a nice NMM gold effect would have looked. I'm not sure which I like more but I do think the gold worked well. The second thing was the face, other people liked how the first one turned out but I was never really sure if I liked the blue. With this one I wanted him to look more human but somehow even more evil so I went with a more normal skin colour but to counter that somewhat I made his eyes a glowing yellow/orange (similar to the sword). I don't mind how this one turned out but I've ended up agreeing with the popular consensus that the other was a little more effective. The other changes worth mentioning are the sword blade - not quite sure why I chose orange, one person commented that it looks like a tangerine ice-block.... The base was also completely different, the previous one was probably the best base I'd ever made so I thought it'd be a bit cheap to copy it so I decided to try and outdo it. I like both but I think this one is better. And finally there's the clawed hand, the customer wanted it to be pointing with one claw rather than all of them being at the one level. It was definitely a good idea.

All up a fun project but I don't think I'll be painting a third anytime soon. Whilst it might not look it, it's probably one of the most time consuming miniatures to paint and a bit of a pain in the arse to boot...