Appa Repaint

My daughter is a huge fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and was the one that got me to sit down and watch my way through the whole show. Well, that and the fact that McFarlane Toys had made this amazing Appa figure that I wanted to get, but couldn't justify it for a show I'd never seen.

Well, I wasn't the only one who was looking at it and lusting over it, because this past weekend, my daughter finally broke down and bought one of them for herself.

She liked the toy, but she wasn't satisfied with displaying it as is. Instead, she wanted to make it really look nice. She wanted to highlight the sculpt that it has to make it show up better. So, right after we got home, she got out all of my paints and started applying a wash on the fur.

She thought that a wash that was a mix of orange and pink would be a good start, but after putting it on a small section, she was afraid it was the wrong way to go. I convinced her to keep going, and then do a brown wash over the top of that.

Once she was done with all of that, the off-white color of the fur looked sickly and gross, so she started dry-brushing white back over the top of that. While she was at it, she highlighted many of the details that existed in the sculpt elsewhere, improving the saddle significantly and so forth.

Here's pictures of the final product.

One thing she didn't touch at all was the face.

It's fine as is, but the yellowish fur around the eyes doesn't seem to fit as well now that the rest of the fur has been drybrushed white.

I don't know if she's interested in painting any further on it, though. Look at the horns. I like that she painted the belts tied around the horns. It looks good.

I'm still not sure if the orange/pink wash was a good idea. It does give it some odd colors  down underneath. It was my fault that she went through with it too. I figured that it would be mostly covered up by the later brown wash, but it still shows through a lot in many places.

Here's some shots of the details she added, like coloring the bedrolls on the saddle. It looked like this:

But now it looks like this:

It's a small detail, but if you ask me, it's a gigantic improvement.

She even painted the buckles on the bedroll pack. They came looking like this:

And she updated it to look like this:

Such a small detail, but it makes such a big difference. I really like it.

There's many more small details she fixed. You can see a lot of them in these comparison photos of my Appa versus hers.

It sure does make mine look crappy in comparison. I may have to do this to mine pretty soon. I'll try to take all the lessons that she learned making her and apply them to hopefully make my process a little easier. I wouldn't be surprised if she goes back in and works on hers more later as well. I guess I'll do a post about it when we do.