Resin Anime Figure Part II - Painting

My new project is continuing at a good pace. I had the opportunity to get her primed over the weekend. She is so big that it was a bit of a task - in the end, I gave her a few thin coats of Vallejo grey primer and then topped it off with some GW white spray in the hopes of not only getting good coverage, but also impenetrable hardness, as I'm a bit weary of painting resin. Especially when a lot of it is so smooth and has nothing for the paint to get its teeth into.

After that fun, I got the chance to actually start painting her last night. Like usual, I took some time to plan out the colours I wanted to use and the order I was going to paint them in. This might seem a bit superfluous, but with the airbrush accurate planning can make a lot of difference. It's mostly to do with hitting the large areas first, but I would also normally paint the darker areas before the lighter ones to prevent some of the problems with overspray.

Speaking of overspray, I've found a trick that works really well to remove unwanted paint should you happen to miss with the airbrush. It isn't so good that you don't have to mask areas off, but it does help a lot with small mistakes. What I do is paint finished areas with a layer of Satin Varnish (it has a sheen much like regular paint, so you probably won't even see it once it has dried. Anyway, with that layer in place I then paint the other colours and hopefully I don't miss. If I do I apply a small quantity of Air Brush Cleaner (the Vallejo stuff) on the end of a very clean paint brush to the discoloured area and gently scrub it once the paint is dry. It seems to take it up pretty quickly without doing any damage as long as you then flush the area with plenty of water afterwards. I guess it works because the cleaning fluid is formulated to dissolve paint in the mechanism and so in moderation it works well on overspray, although only in fairly minor cases - don't expect to spray the skin with 10 litres of black and then just get it back off again.

Anyway, I was really happy with the way the skin came out. I actually used a few different colours to get the effect - It feels like a bit of a shame that most of it won't be visible when she's finished as it'll be underneath her dress and only visible from rather crafty angles!

I laid down a base coat with a mix of Pale Flesh and Dark Flesh. This gave me a slightly yellowish tone that had a bit of warmth to it. I then added some orange to the mix and shaded round the edges of her clothing. I then did a few small highlights with pure white (points of light). At this stage she was looking a bit blotchy due to all the colour variations, but I then smoothed in all of the transitions
with a thin coat of Pale Flesh. I'm really happy with the skin tone, it's definitely a recipe I'll be using again in the future.

Shading the face was fun too - I used the orange to add a shadow above the eyes as well as some colour to the cheeks. One of the cool features of this figure was that it came with eye decals, so after I'd whited out her whole eye (as this would show through the clear areas of the decal), I just had to apply them straight over the top - although it took a bit of lining up.

I'm also having a bit of an experiment with "Micro Sol". It's a solution that dissolves the decal into the paint to supposedly give it a painted on look. We'll see if that works, but either way I'll do a bit of varnish over the top of that to really mesh it into the figure.

Finally, I had a bit of a start on some gold edging and a bit of a rough start on some white marble for the armour. It's still early days, but it's looking pretty good. I didn't manage to get a very good picture of the marble, but maybe next update!