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Ive persevered and continued work on my first bust. I have to wait to print her base later this week since Im out of resin, so Ive got a few days to fine tune and hopefully bring some harmony to it.

Im trying to figure out how to make the armor *work* and the demon horn has to wait on the base since they interrelate, but what Im most torn over is the face and how to make it less chalky. Ive probably
spent more time on that than I have any other part of the bust so far.

And MAN, the close up shots make it look so much worse than in person, but I think its important to showcase your bad stuff along with the good.

What look were you going for? I don't want to assume anything. It looks like you might be going for NMM, but I'd rather know where you were headed than give useless advice.

Generally, regardless of material, I think you need to work in some deeper shadows. You might not be comfortable doing high contrast OSL, but something in that direction would help give the bust depth and definition.

Yea Ive sketched in the NMM but its got a long way to go. (right now it obviously doesnt look particularly metal)

So go more into the darker side of things? I know that sketching kind of overlooks that, at least the way Ive done it, so thats probably not a bad idea.

Yeah, the high contrast between light and dark will help the armour pop. Personally, I need props to do OSL without mucking it up, so I normally pick a direction and use my desk light to cast the correct shadow, and then I take a bunch of reference pictures.

With the darker shadows you have two general options - multiple washes or layering/wet blending. Washes are easier, but blending will end up looking better if it's done right. Obviously a combination of the two is also possible.

Also, there's the question of colour - a lot of guys add subtle colour to the shadow in their NMM. Let's you get away from too much grey and help balance the overall colour with other parts of the model.

My last point is about weathering. How 'used' is this armour supposed to look?

Not over used, theres some scratches on the shoulder pad.

One thing (since I sculpted it) that Ive tried is using the render in Keyshot, which you'd think would give me a leg up, but it gets a bit more complicated past drawing in the light sources.