Four-tone post shading! (Patreon)

My friends, here's the basic coloring done! It might not look like it, but this was in all seriousness a matter of two afternoons and evenings! The shading isn't finished yet though, I need to add the black outlines, markings, and then give it a good Ammo Shader treatment! 

Pictures are in reverse order, as usual. So how did I approach it?

Well, I started with a black primer. As you can see in the last 3 photos, I sprayed each camouflage patch individually, masked it, and added another one, finishing with the "base color" = dull green. Basically, the camouflage was sprayed in reverse order. Why? It's infinitely quicker and easier than spraying a base coat and then mask, unmask, repeat, with every camouflage patch. The disadvantage? You need to test if the colors work together on a paint mule. And you don't have much control over any kind of shading, so during this stage I only sprayed the most basic light gradients. 

When the mask was removed, a few imperfections popped up. Luckily, all of them were easy to fix during the second shading stage. Here I sprayed 2-3 layers of lights over each camouflage color (every paint was lightened with Deck Tan as it gives it a nice desaturated tone without being too over-the-top like, let's say, white). Without any masking, of course. The paints are diluted enough during this stage that any kind of overspray is hardly noticeable, and if it happens, it kinda softens the contrast between each color. 

The model is a bit hard to photograph right now because it's full of satin and extremely glossy stains thanks to the post-shading, but it'll be sealed with a coat of flat varnish very soon. 

Now I need to paint the black outlines with a paintbrush and move onto the markings. 

What makes me really happy is how the colors pretty much correspond with the ones I used in my color profile. At this point I can't give you the exact paint numbers because there were too many, but I got them on video :) But as usual, there will be no mixing ratios because everything was done by the good old guesstimating 🤣