Hello! I love your finished Jyuratodus mini a lot and was wondering how you applied the silver paint? The scales almost looked like bismuth, and I wanna try to emulate that
Thank you!
So for the scales, let's talk supplies first.
The main thing I used are color shifting metallic paints. These paints by Vallejo are neat, because the painted object appears to change color depending on the angle the light hits them. Here is a video showing off all the paints in Vallejo's line. Highly recommend at least skipping through to check out the effects!
There is also a brand called Turbo Dork with a lot of cool paints that have the same effect! Sword n Steele has another similar video going over some of the paints in the Turbo Dork line.
Finally you'll need gloss primer, or some gloss varnish. Shiny!
So in my specific case, I used these two colors (I think. I have many colors and I don't remember exactly lol).
So the key thing is that for these paints to work best, they must be applied on top of solid black. Ideally a glossy solid black!
Sadly I did not take progress pics, but I can describe the steps briefly. Note that I used an airbrush for each of these steps.
I primed the whole figure in solid black. I did not have gloss primer on hand, so I used a matte black
Then I applied some gloss varnish on the whole thing. Got it nice and shiny
I applied the Green Silver Blue to the whole figure. I made sure to get full coverage on the body, so we could see the color shifting from any angle.
Finally, I applied a few layers of the Orange Violet just from the top. I wanted a little more color variation, and I thought having another color just partially there would be cool. And I think the final result was pretty successful!
I then painted the rest of the non-metallic colors using some pretty common techniques, both with an airbrush and a regular brush. I did give the scales a gloss varnish at the end as well.
Now if you don't have an airbrush, these paints still work but you have to be a little extra careful. The main thing is you want to apply thin layers carefully and slowly. You want to avoid pooling in the recesses, because the particles that make the effect will get stuck there. Here is an example I did with a regular paintbrush
You can see how the mushroom cap is already having the blue to violet color shift effect. I want to say I did about three to four layers of the paint after painting it with a glossy black.
I can recommend this video by Dana Howl for another example of how to use these paints. I also found this video by Kris Belleau where he does a quick demo on applying a Turbo Dork paint with a regular brush.
Hope all that helps!
