Nekima, the Dark Sibling

This is the rough photo for my entry to wampforum's Wyrd Miniatures painting competition.  Nekima is a malifaux model from the neverborn faction.  she is a nephelim and is lilith's sister (hence dark sibling)

I have a few problems with this model, however.  I initially bought this model because I thought the pose was awesome and it was just a huge intimidating fig.  After struggling to assemble and to a lesser extent paint this model I can say I don't like it very much. 

Assembly had a few issues.   Firstly, her horns are separate pieces each.  They have very small contact points to her head, and therefore broke off at least a couple times before I finished painting her.  Her wings had the same issue; they are heavy pewter pieces that aren't all too thin and they only connect into her back at very small points.  These broke off even more times than the horns.  Her face wasn't cast very well; her right cheek and eye are somewhat higher than her left so looking at her face straight on is a little bit of an eye sore.  Her ass cheek had the same problem - it was a little lower than her leg and therefore looked odd but luckily this competition is an online competition and all angles of the model will not be available.  I'm not very talented in putty work so I just try to mask her flaws with awesome painting!  The wrists connecting to her sleeves were also horrible and had large gaps due to the nature of how her sword/hands were cast and didn't align properly with the rest of her arms.  The scenic base didn't fit perfectly into the plastic base but I don't think this was a huge issue.

Painting her wasn't as bad except for a couple things.  I was happy with the way her skin and tights and cloak turned out.  I don't usually paint purple things so I thought it was fun.  I also really liked her sword, it brought me back to painting 40k chaos weapons with old GW paints I never use like Scaly Green and Hawk Turquoise.  Later on after I take some good copy photos with my friend Sherry's help I'm considering whipping out the airbrush and trying some simple OSL on the eyes of the visage on the sword.  My problems were mainly based around painting the flesh of her wings.  The sculpt had very little details for the most part on the wings so I almost had to freehand fleshy designs onto it.  The vein-like parts were indeed sculpted, but most other parts were just fudged with some blending.  It turned out decent but not as smooth as I would've liked.  For some reason I was feeling a bit burnt out of this model at this point just because wet blending all the flesh on the wings took a while.  Luckily that was the last part I had to do.  I threw some snow on the base with a great snow recipe taught to me by my good old friend Paul.  He mixes PVA glue, water, and snow flock to get a chunky consistency then globs it on the base in various locations and finally sprinkles snow flock on top while the chunks of snow mix are still wet.  this makes a very fluffy snow texture when it dries. Awesome, thanks for the tips Paul!

Good photos will be coming in the next week or so I imagine, also will be taking Sherry out for dim sum with my wife for all the help with her camera!!!