How do i paint dead muscles and tongue?

[Erikjust]

Question i know how to paint dead skin, but what about the muscles and the tongue?
I wanted to know how do i paint dead muscles like those seen on terrorgheist and zombie dragon wings?
Should i just use the normal guide on muscle painting and just take all the colors and do them one tone darker or what and what of the tongue do i make i paint it in a dark purple color or what do i do?

 

[ekipage]

I will caveat this with I am not the best painter or most experienced, but here is my 2 cents. I would suggest looking up some images for Zombies for inspiration as you might find something you really like and can figure out which paints to use to get a similar effect. However if trying for something semi-realistic, muscle has a lot of blood flow to it so it would start to blacken when dead so you could always go red with a black glaze over some of it and maybe hightlight some a little brighter like it hasn't all fully decomposed yet, or maybe use a darker green or turquoise over the red for the effect. Tongue I would probably either do blue-ish, purple-ish or red/pink-ish with a black or dark blue glaze to tone it down.

 

[Beatnik59]

When something is dead, the heart stops beating, and the blood no longer has oxygen. As a result, fresh blood no longer goes to the skin, depriving it of that natural pinkish orange glow. So the best thing to do is to go to the opposite side of the color wheel from pinkish orange (a kind of desaturated teal) for your undertones, building on palates of greys and whites...

...But you already know that.

That blood, however, has got to go somewhere. And it tends to pool in the muscles and internal organs. Furthermore, the blood loses its bright red hue, because it has no more oxygen: it turns dark purple or brown, kind of like it does when you poke open a blood blister on your foot a few weeks later. The longer its been dead, the less purple it will be, and the more brown it will be. Long dead tissues will be very dark, almost black.

Now the tongue is a muscle with a lot of blood sitting in it. However, the blood is going to sit in the deepest portion of it, while the surface that contains the taste buds and such will be more like skin. If you see pictures of varicose veins, that's the kind of idea you want, with a kind of pallid, desaturated pastel on the top, with disgusting black bulging veins and lymph nodes on the underside.

Does this help?