First time painting a miniature in over 20 years

[meaty_nosebleeds]

all sorts of tutorials are helpful from all sorts of styles.
as for the primer, you can try it, but i prefer to use a basic white undercoat, as a colourd undercoat turns my whole mini that colour. i think that mixing a drop of blue into the paint is better, and a white undercoat can really make your skin "glow"

 

[Alexandra]

I agree with meaty. In this case, you'll better stick with a white undercoat. If you think your base color is too orange, try to do the mix with ligth flesh and brown instead of going with pre made colors.

I also found that the base color is there to keep the layers even - so that you don't see the brush stroke or the metal under - and are note definitive on the end look of the mini. You can shadow it with blue ( wash ) giving it a cooler tone, but when you start highlight it you almost won't see the base color. I do recomend the use of glazing medium strongly, since it enables you to have smooth transitions between color.

Hope it helps.

 

[shponglefan]

@ Darthmarsh: Thanks for the tutorial link! I'm sure it will come in handy. And thank you for the kind words re: the mercenary. I agree I am very self-critical, but it's what motivates me. If I get too happy with my own work, I start to lose motivation to improve!

@ meaty, Alexandra: I took your advice and stuck to the regular primer for now, and working on mixing the base colour itself.

So here she is, with new base colours (still a bit rough, but you get the idea). I opted for a darker grey for the leather, mixed wih dark blue. And for the skin I went with about a 60/40 blend of flesh highlight w/ flesh base. I tried adding some blue to the latter mix, but found it made it too grey. But I think I'm now closer to the colours I had originally envisioned.

View attachment 22468

 

[meaty_nosebleeds]

looking great so far. a much better basecoat to play with.
don't worry too much about the blue if it doesn't work for you. it's actually quite a hard technique to get right, i struggled with it the first few times. everybody's got their own style, and if bits from mine don't work for you there are thousands of different ways to paint, just find one that suits you and run with it.
hope to see an update of her soon, she's a very cool mini

 

[Alexandra]

Much better. You can always use a dark brown to shade her or a flesh mix with purple. If you have a discarded mini somewhere you can use it as a test and see the results before applying it on her.