The brown covers the pink, sink the red?

I'm kinda pushing it with the titles, I know, but that's what comes from excitement.

After thinking about it and generally procrastinating most of the day, I spent about half an hour this afternoon fixing my pink issue with what ended up being quite a simple solution. I mixed up what I was planning to be a red/brown glaze and stopped at just a single drop of Scarlet Red and changed my mind. After watching some YouTube videos from Studio McVey on the two-brush blending technique recently, I thought I'd see if I could smooth the transitions out a bit using this method.

Boy did it work! Inspired, I then mixed up a dark brown glaze and went over the whole miniature to tone it all back down a bit, and I'm so pleased with the result. Using a second damp brush to take the fresh layer of paint away from the areas I wanted to keep highlighted, and to feather out the edge of the colour I was applying, the transitions were miles ahead in terms of smoothness.

I'm now ready to declare the hide finished. I'll do the horns and eyes later, but the actual hide is done. Here's where I'm at:













On to the armour, finally! Now originally I was planning on ignoring the box art (which depicts aqua armour), and just paint it blue instead. Beyond the fact that there's not a single aqua paint in the VGA lineup, I've got an awesome colour app on my phone that calculates complimentary colours and it tells me a soft mid-blue is a perfect match for the scarlet I've been using.

But meh, I love the box art and it's primarily because the aqua strikes such a balance with the scarlet. So I spent some time messing with my paints in the palette; the VGA line has three primary blues (dark, mid and light) and three primary greens (again, three tones), so I figured what the hell - maybe that'll give me three aquas to use. I wasn't quite right, but they certainly gave me some awesome tones to use.

Below is a picture of my palettes. The lighting really doesn't do the colours justice as they are more saturated and bright in real life, but you can see I've noted the mix for each.






So based on this, my plan is as follows:
1) Basecoat with a 1:1 mix of Dark Green (DG) to Magic Blue (MB)
2) Highlight with 1:1 Sick Green (SG) to MB
3) Highlight with 1:1 Escorpena Green (EG) to Electric Blue (EB)
4) Glaze with the basecoat mix to tone it back if I need to
5) Shade with 2:1:1 DG+MB+ Imperial Blue (IB)
6) Shade with 2:1:2 DG+MB+IB
7) Shade with 1:1 DG+IB
8) Final edge highlighting and hotspots with a lightened version of the EG+EB mix

I'll adjust as necessary throughout the process and I'm actually planning on doing mid-step mixes between highlighting and shading tones, so all up it should be 13 discreet paint mixes. If it makes sense at the time, I'll also add some very subtle red glazes to represent reflected colour from his arms and neck, but we'll have to see.

But before all that, I need to paint the glowing rune in his belt buckle. It's a really bright glowing rune in the box art, but it's a very fine embossed depression in the miniature so it's not going to be fun. Oh well, the means justify the end in this case :)

Until next time.