Velvet: real painting begins

A good 80% of the work on any resin figure is spent fixing surface issues, sanding, washing, priming, resanding, repriming, etc. With that done, the fun part comes, painting. I enjoy the painting session the most as the kit starts to really come together at this stage. The repetitive motions of sanding, priming, sanding, repeat gets laborious with nothing but gray tones and the color of the putties. Most of the parts have second layers of color paint on them. The exception to this are the red parts which have been base coated with wine red.

Velvet has a lot of black clothing and details. The difficult thing about painting black is that you cannot shade with pure black. So I used carbon black which is a very dark gray tone, added some base white to lighten it slightly, then used it as a shading tone over the parts that were previously base coated with finisher’s pure black. This way, I can effectively create some shading effects while still keeping these parts black.

The hair was base coated with sand brown. I mixed a custom blond using finisher’s pure yellow and white to create a cream blond color. The custom paint was a little too yellow, but spraying that over the sand brown toned it down a little. Since there is nothing else to do with the hair after spraying on the custom blond color, I sprayed on a layer of clear flat to dull out he finish and further lighten the tone.

The base that came with the kit begins with a coat of finisher’s pure black. The pure black was sprayed wet and heavy over the top surface of the base. Once cured over night, I took some tamiya polishing compound (the stuff is similar to toothpaste) and polished the top surface using a fine cloth. I want the top section to be smooth and as close to a glass/mirror like finish as possible. I still have another technique that I want to try out for when I paint the base’s details.

The skin colored parts were first base coated in white. This works to completely neutralize the gray tone of the primer. With skin tone, if sprayed over the gray, the skin tone may pick up a grayish tone which makes the character look a little pale/dead; so to remedy this, base white is used over the primer. After the white has been laid down, the first layer of skin tone is sprayed. This is a darker skin tone that is the base color, and currently it makes the kit look sun burnt. Next up is a highlighting session followed by a blending session using lighter tones of the skin color.

After painting the white, the eyes are masked for work later when the skin tone has been painted. The masking uses blue sticky tack applied by a toothpick to the eyes. A very small amount is used and the eyes are carefully masked off.

After masking the eyes the head piece is painted with the base skin color.