Painting Sapphire from Nightshift by Exotic Cancer

 For this one, I tried an experiment, realised I'd made a mistake, then did my best to correct it.

Painting miniatures sometimes do be like that.

Step 1

Same as always, we prime the figure with a matt black

Step 2

Two thin coats of Pallid Wych Flesh. This is one of my favourite "off-white" colours as it's very close to actually being white, but slightly off, and translucent enough that lower layers show through pretty well.


 Step 3

We give her a wash with Draknehof Blue. The original idea was to try and emulate the art by having her skin with blue shades, but I end up course correcting for reasons I will explain in a future step.


 Step 4

Highlight with Pallid Wych Flesh


 So this is where I started to feel like I'd made a critical error with the skin, as it looks more like a blue/grey tone. While this would work really well for doing a vampire, a corpse, or for "greyscale" painting techniques, our girl Sapphire is a living, breathing person and we want her look to tie in more with the other girls.

Step 5

We course correct ourselves by applying a thin layer of Flayed One Flesh. This will add some peach/pink tones back to the model, giving her a bit more warmth and making her look alive.


 Step 6

So, what we're going to see here going forward is one of those situations where you start thinking you might have "ruined" a model, only for later stages of painting to start bringing it together.

Colouring the hair with Army Painter Voidshield Blue helped take away from the "greyscale" look the model currently has, and really alleviated some of my fears about the skin.


 Step 7 

Very simple and familiar step. Apply a wash of Drakenhof Nightshade to the hair, making sure to keep it out of the folds and trying to minimise how "stained" the more prominent parts of the hair look.


 Step 8

Move on to the clothing. For this we use Vallejo Magic Blue and colour the top, skirt and shoes.

At this point, any lingering doubts I had about the skin had definitely gone away. If I were to do this model again, I'd do her skin differently, but we're going to work with what I've already done here.


 Step 9

We move on to highlight the areas we previously done with Magic Blue, this time using Voidshield Blue from before. Make sure to leave the deeper recesses in the original Magic Blue colour in order to create shading.


 Step 10

Move on to the more incidental details.

For the cuffs of the top, the lower edge of the skirt, and the visible underwear at the back, I used Vallejo Wolf Grey.

The eyebrows were given a little life with Voidshield Blue, and the rims of the glasses were done with our old friend Scrofulous Brown.


 Step 11

For the last touches, we do what we've done with the rest of the girls

Checker pattern using Bone White and Stone Grey, lined with a black pen for the "stage", painting the rim with Magic Blue, then applying a matt varnish.


 

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