With the base skin tone cured overnight, I sprayed on the lighter skin tone first focusing on highlight areas of the body. I turned the air pressure down to about 6-8 psi and sprayed very close to the surface to draw in the highlights. The following two pictures shows the highlighted areas.
Once I have the highlighted areas painted, I open up the air pressure to a about 20-25 psi and spray from a distance to mist the lighter skin tone onto the part. This blends the highlighted areas and the darker areas creating a subtle shading effect. Below are some comparison pictures with the upper torso and the lower body before and after applying the lighter skin tone.
The blade was masked off using tamiya masking tape as it is very thin and great to work with. A toothpick is used to position and press down the masking tape. A brand new hobby knife is used to slice away the excess masking tape. 3M blue painter’s masking tape is used to mask off larger areas that are not along the detail edge. The 3M tape is too thick in comparison to the tamiya masking tape and will tend to allow bleeding more so than the tamiya tape. Once everything was masked off, gold was sprayed on to the part. Once the paint has dried for about 20-30 minutes, I remove the masking tape. I do this because I don’t want the paint to fully cure before I remove it, there is a greater chance for paint chipping or getting jagged edges when the paint has cured with the masking tape still on the part. For such cases, I just run the hobby knife along the tape’s edge to ensure a clean line between the paint and masked areas. Now the dragon lance is just about finished. I still need to apply a clear gloss and then do a wash to bring out some of the dragon head’s details.
