Dreadtober 2020: Fire Knee!

Some progress in Dreadtober 2020 on my Contemptor Mortis Salamanders Legion dreadnought. I completed the under coat using a white colour in order to base coat using contrast paints -- in this case warp lightning contrast paint following my earlier recipe. The one disadvantage of this approach on a model of this size is that it leaves whiter colours in the recesses. This makes getting black in to those areas more essential and time consuming. Not an impossible task, just one that takes time. 

Moving beyond the green base coat, I decided to resurrect my blending approach to fire painting for the knee cap. Its a limited area of the model to try this technique on, but I'm please with the outcome -- see image.

In brief, I've used a wet blending approach with the fire here, similar to how I paint Bloodletter's swords. I start with the white colours here and then apply yellows to the inner fire, blend with orange as the next layer up, and then red at the extremes. This creates a nice visual from a distance and works well to suggest the fire aspect of the miniature. Close up, as per the image, it is easy to see just how messy and haphazard this approach actually is. I won't claim it is neat, but fire isn't generally neat either. This is a paint job best viewed from a little distance in my mind to create the desired effect. 

Next steps will be to extend the fire to the main torso and focus on highlighting the relevant parts of the model. I'm getting there now and its looking promising to say the least - I can almost feel how I want the paint scheme to end up looking!