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Any advice on how to paint this style with dark red and light red on this model? It is hard for me to imagine properly preshading this, or whatever the hell technique they use for this to come out like that.

Airbrushing and highlighting

Well yeah but could you put the steps down? Im new to airbrushing and don't wanna feth it up

So what I'd do for something like this, is prime a ligh grey, then load up your airbrush with black. Use this around the dark areas (the lower parts of the curved sections, the rear etc. Then load up your airbrush with your base red. Spray this all over, but leave the very darkest areas black. With a bit of spray control, the black preshade should create a tonal variation in the red layer. For highlights I would hairy brush layer up to a red highlight (use a fleshtone mixed with your red, to a tone that you like) but you could use an airbrush too if you wanted. For the stripes, personally I would freehand them due to the curved surface, but alternatively you could try to mask them off. I'd highlight these by hand for better control on the small area.

How do you get those crazy bright vibrant highlights on the edges though. This model doesn't show it very well but you seem some models out there that are practically glowing. That's hard to do.

Just keep mixing the flesh tone into the red. There's nothing complicated about it. Having the dark shade will make your colours look very bright anyway, so any highlights over the top will brighten it even more.

so just keep mixing pink fleshy paint in higher and higher ratios to my base red and it will start getting brighter. I thought orange was supposed to be the highlight of red. I tried orange/yellow and it didn't really have that POP I was looking for

You can use orange... That will give a warm orangey highlight(oddly enough) you can also use a khaki/beige which will give a duller tone. I find a flesh tone gives a more neutral highlight which sits between the 2 and looks more realistic, but it's dealers choice really, you'll find what you prefer. Even using fleshtone you have variety in the tone of the flesh itself which will give different results. Have a play and see what you like.


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I also find that if I want to warm up my highlight, I'll glaze it using bloodletter, which will warm it nicely without making it into an orange highlight.

Its funny I couldn't figure out which red I liked for Saim Hann so I bought 7 different Vallejo air paint reds from different ranges. I ended up settling on a color called "Red" The other 6 just didn't do it for me.

haha cant beat a classic! i like Vallejo heavy red. I mix it with elf flesh for a highlight. need to do some experiments with bugmans glow.