Time to get painting!
First off, this is what I'm working with. My buddy Jon sent this to me so that I could get restarted.
I spent probably an hour and a half popping open all the bottles and dropping in a ball bearing. This is supposed to really help with mixing up the paints... and the set came with 100 ball bearings, so it seemed like a no brainer.
I also picked up a couple of Games Workshop contrast paints because I've been wanting to see how they work and this seems like the perfect opportunity. I picked up Blood Angels Red and Shyish Purple.
Before I get started with the pictures, AP means Army Painter and GW means Games Workshop.
I started out doing a heavy drybrush of AP Dark Stone followed by AP Ash Grey and AP Matt White. The goal was to give the contrast paint a nice underlying shading. It felt almost like painting the model in black and white, but very rough.
For the next bit, I wish I had taken more photos of the intermediate steps. Unfortunately, you'll just get to see the end result.
I started by coating the model in GW Blood Angels Red contrast paint. It goes on looking really sloppy, but dries very nicely. This is the still wet photo...
Once that was dry, I added some GW Shyish Purple contrast paint to what I considered to be the darker areas... the bits of hair, the tail and the frills. Once the purple was dry, I drybrushed the hair and frills with AP Dragon Red and the AP Pure Red. This was done to try to blend the purple and red together.
For the mouth, I based the tongue in a 50/50 AP Pixie Pink/AP Pure Red mix and then highlighted the end with AP Pixie Pink. The teeth were painted with AP Skeleton Bone. I didn't see any need to highlight the teeth as they're pretty small.
The bronze areas (collar and high quarters Khorne mark) were based in AP Oak Brown and then AP Weapon Bronze. I will say that I miss the coverage of the GW base paints, but the AP paints are working well. Once dry, I used AP Soft Tone to tone the bronze bits down a little.
This is as far as I got. While painting, I watched around three episodes of Breaking Bad, so I guess this took about three hours. I'm pretty impressed with how the contrast paints work. I can definitely see buying more of those for future projects.
I still need to do some more detail work here. I want to highlight the bronze a bit more and maybe add an orange glow around the high quarter Khorne marks. I also need to paint in the eyes and decide whether or not I want to leave the spine spikes red or paint them like the teeth. Toes need to be painted also.
I'll decide on the base when the rest of the model is done. Hopefully soon.
