Gah.
This may have been the most vexing figure to date I've worked on-- not just in this boxed set but of all my minis. I think what it comes down to is that I was never quite happy with her.
Dennis Mize, for reasons unknown to me, liked sculpting crimped hair on female figures during this time period. While this is normally not a problem, the wild mane of hair on Tristessa actually had some very deep crevasses that were hard to get paint into, resulting in lots of experimenting with washes (and some cursing) to get the desired result. Another thing I'm not so fond of with her is her face. Both here, and in the elf vampire from the Demihuman Vampires set, Mize's attempt to make an elf ugly simply comes down to making the features coarse, which I don't really care for.
Now, on to the paint job, such as it is. This character has been stripped of paint to repaint more than any Ravenloft mini I've done-- and even in the end, I'm not sure how I feel about the result, but it was a learning experience.
First off, trying to literally render her skin (her original description is, after all, that of a drow) as black made for extra difficulty in shading, though I was able to stripe on dark blue paint (sort of like blending blusher on cheeks) to halfway decent effect. I would probably have been better off using the dark blue as her base skin tone and then working highlights and shadows up and down. Also, while Tristessa's eyes actually do have pupils, I left them blank to make her look more ghostly, as well as letting the eyes stand out more in the darkness. I actually used a touch of a blue luminous paint in them, though it seemed to glow better on the newspaper I use to catch drips and spots.
The dress and the mists around her feet have an effect which I like when I look at it with my own eyes, but which I fear didn't photograph well. I went with the original violet gauze dress description used in the Black Box, simply to avoid the problems of rendering black on black. To attempt to give it a gauzier quality-- pretty tough to make lead look light and airy, after all!-- I mixed quantities of Delta Ceramcoat's Pearl Medium into the purple paint. Similarly, the shades of grey that I used to shade and highlight the mist around here also had Pearl Medium mixed into them, to help visually tie them into her gown. However, the flash photography often picked up specific particles of the medium, making it look a bit speckled, and the mixing of medium into the shades of grey toned down their contrast. Again, I'll chalk this up to a learning experience; I still like the idea of pearlescent greys to use as the Mists of Ravenloft, and it's possible that I will refine the technique and apply it to a future piece.
For those who would like a Tristessa mini but cannot get the boxed set (or don't care for this mini any more than I do), I recommend the Reaper Warlord mini Kaena the Banshee, a lovely sculpt (with much nicer hair!).