heidiho
yeah the blending took me ages on this one ... i tried some new methods for my blending. I usually go for wetblending on minis, but this does not work all the time.
Now the thing was, i used to wetblend the areas with 3 colours in use for an area like the skin. I applied the basecolour to this area and worked into this with a micture of the maincolour when it was still wet. To explain the colourthing:
Most of the time i use only 3 colours for areas, if i don´t want to show transitions from many different colours.
basecolour: usually the darkest colour which is used first on the miniature. For skin this would be a colour like leather brown
maincolour: lets say this is the mediumtone for this area, so it would be a medium fleshtone in case of the skin
lightcolour: this colour is used to get lighter colours when mixed with the maincolour
Now like i said i´ve used the basecolour first and wetblended with several mixes of the base with maincolour. Here is the trick for my wetblending, since i use many thinned down colours for it. The ratio for thinning is about 1 part colour to 4 parts water. I did this blending up to a mix of main colour + lightcolour to a ratio which looked cool for my taste.
Now the blending wasn´t perfect at all, which is a slight problem of wetblending from time to time. So here´s the trick

I used some mixed colours again on the surface which i thinned down even more in a ratio of 1:8 and used those washes on areas with not so perfect blendings. This takes a lot of time since the colour won´t cover very much, but it draws highlights together and gets a smooth finish on transitions. And another trick is to use a little water on those washes edges to change the colour a bit more to total transparency. Again i used those washes up to the lightest highlightcolour which took ages .... it needs some practice and its very hard for me to describe with my crappy english
