I’ve been working on this K.O.G. from The Five Star Stories, and the front is finally at a point where I’m happy to show it assembled.
I often see F.S.S. kits finished with beautifully smooth airbrushed metallics, so for this one I wanted to see what would happen if I treated the gold entirely as a brush-painted NMM surface and kept the brushwork visible.
A lot of the stroke work comes from a hatching technique I experimented with on an earlier Gelgoog. On the larger armor panels I build the highlights with directional strokes, often spreading outward from the brightest area. From a distance they merge into the metallic surface, while up close the individual marks are still very obvious. In some areas the highlight shapes are deliberately pushed a little further for composition, similar to the way metallic surfaces are sometimes treated in 2D mecha illustration.
The lighting setup is fairly simple: a strong key light coming from above and in front, plus a broad cool skylight. I think of the two lights almost as competing for territory. Most of the front is strongly controlled by the key light, so I kept those areas relatively pure gold. As the influence of the key light drops toward the sides and recessed areas, the muted blue-green skylight starts to take over.
I also gave the ground reflections different colors. The right side picks up orange-red, while the left side shifts toward green. There is another orange-red reflection between the legs, almost as if the K.O.G. were standing over a red carpet. Part of the reason for doing this was to make the color balance change as you move around the model: the left view becomes greener and calmer, while the right gives a stronger orange-red / blue-green contrast.
The back is still unfinished, so this is only the front half of the experiment for now.
I’d be interested to hear how the visible brushwork reads to other painters — does it still feel metallic from a normal viewing distance, or does it start to read more like an illustration?
