Ancient Stegadon (1)

First of all, what a wonderful sculpt!
And all the different options and spare parts in the box, just lovely!

I decieded, that since the sculptor clearly has outdone himself with this model and all, I'll refrain from converting it too much. And apart from shifting the position of one of its legs a bit, so it'd fit better onto the Jungle-base I ordered from Micro Arts Studio, I've left the model without any customization worth mentioning.

As such, there ain't no pictures of the whole assembling process or nothing, but for anyone who might read this, and might be wondering; trust me, the parts fit (almost) perfectly together, and as it's all plastic, there's no risk of getting a model that's bent or nothing. Just don't glue the howda on top of the monster, before you've painted them seperately, and everything should be fine.

Speaking of painting, I've started doing just that.
As I know my brother's Lizardmen army got most creatures painted either red or orange, while the Skinks and Saurus are shades of blue, I decieded to stick to his palette, as best I could without asking him what colours he'd used.

So the Stegadon would have to be red, and personally, I love GW's Scab Red for red leather / tough skin. Also, I believe my brother's used it on his own, but that's speculation...
Anyways, as the Stegadon was supposed to be of the ancient kind, I played with the thought of making it much lighter than what they're regularily painted. My idea would be for its scales to be more bony, like all the horns and bone ends protruding from its back.
And after some testing, I found a procedure, which gave the desired effect (in my eyes).















First, I basecoated it Chaos Black with GW's primer spray. Then I mixed Scab Red and Liche Purple together, to get a nice base colour for all the skin (don't ask me about the ratios, I just mixed until I got a colour I fancied...). Then all the scales and most of the skin got a few layers of watered down Scab Red; I did leave shadowy areas and recesses alone though, the purple base looking like darker regular flesh. Then I started mixing Bronzed Flesh into the watered down Scab Red, and simply went over every thing jutting out, be it muscles, raised parts of skin, scales or horns/bony parts. I added more and more Bronzed Flesh to the mix, while covering less and less of the raised areas, and finally started mixing Bleached Bone with the rest, to get the final highlights for the scales. The tips of the horns got some extra highlighting with Skull White + Bleached Bone, jsut to make them look slightly sharper.















As you might have spotted, there's quite a bit of skin left, which I havn't finnished painting, although I'm going to start working on it, as soon as I've finnished this post. While I do that, I have to try to figure out how I'm to paint all the gold and such, using NonMetallicMetal paints. I've given it a test try, on the decoration by the tail, but I'm not sure about the results; I think it's slightly too yellow, and don't look all that shiny to me neither...
I'll see what I can come up with!