Painting Be'lakor

Introduction

I started painting Be'lakor last year in October. It has been a long and drawn-out journey, but here he is.

Prime

Black.

Painting the skin and horns

The rocks he is standing on are black highlighted to blue; the NMM silver is black highlighted to purple. I decided on going with neutral greys for the skin, with some browns added to some areas.

Drybrush the whole thing with successive layers of lighters greys, while still keeping everything dark.

Start with Heavy Charcoal. This gives a very slight bluish hint, to be noted for the future. I went back to neutral with a 2:1 mix of Black and Heavy Grey.

Now with a 1:1 mix of Black and Heavy Grey, then Heavy Grey on its own, to introduce some browns. Concentrate the latter on the horns/claws.

Finally with Cold Grey, then Stonewall Grey.

Blackline all the muscles with Basilicanum Grey. 

Apply Skeleton Horde on any claws and feet. Subtle, but it will put more browns in there.

Superhighlight the skin and horns Stonewall Grey.

Painting the wings

I always wanted to try a leathery textured look - here goes, inspired by Squidmar. Spoiler: it is not even remotely as easy as in the video.

Dilute Dead White on the wet palette and draw these shapes - elongated and regular circles. Highlight the center and thicken the lines two times.

Dilute the following Contrast paints 1:1 (except the purple, which is 2:1) and use them as glazes, going up: Blood Angels Red, Flesh Tearers Red, Shyish Purple, Talassar Blue.

Unfortunately this just looked like white circles with paint on them, which made me lose motivation. 

I then re-watched the tutorial like 10 times and decided on trying again. This time, with smaller ellipses. Apply the glazes. This actually looked a lot better.

Do this 3 times in total, with the second time just highlighting the previous shapes, and the final one a superhighlight of the previous.

Finish the wings by highlighting the raised areas instead of the shapes, by mixing in a bit of the glaze into Dead White.

The result is bombastic and colorful although I am not in love with it.

How to use Contrast paints without it being obvious you are using Contrast paints

After all that time spent on the wings, I had no patience to do the same on these small details. Let's burn through the eyes, tongue and chaos star with minimal effort by taking advantage of the drybrush already in place.

I flooded the eyes with Blood Angels Red and the star with Hexwraith Flame. I coated the tongue with Volupus Pink.

That's already half-decent after drying.

I let some Flesh Tearers Red into the canal in the middle of the tongue, and we're done there. I placed another layer of Blood Angels Red into just the eye sockets, and another layer or two of Hexwraith Flame in around of the star.

All well and good, but not enough contrast. Also because the "pre-shade" was done with the drybrush, the innermost parts are the darkest instead of the brightest. I fixed that with a drop of white into the pupil area, and small arrow shapes in the star.

Another drop of Blood Angels Red totally obscured the white pupil underneath, so I grabbed some Dead White / Blood Angels Red wing highlight mix from the palette and drew a pupil with that instead.

The star had the opposite problem, with the white spots being way too visible. I flooded the star with two more layers of Hexwraith Flame to fix it.

Fixing the skin and talons around the wings

By applying the hundred layers of glazes on the wings with a large brush, I splashed a lot over the surrounding skin area. I fixed that by going back to the 2:1 (in truth I think I got more of a 3:2) mix of Black and Heavy Grey, and painting over any affected area. This ruined my nice drybrushed highlights, but I did not want to further destroy anything else, so I just blacklined the wing joints with Basilicanum Grey and painted the wing talons (as well as the teeth and fingernails which I somehow missed the first time) with Skeleton Horde.

More details

Dark red loincloth.

Paint the skulls. Paint the chains and rings NMM silver, and all the trim, crowns and jewelry NMM gold. This might the first and last time I ever try NMM on a bigger model. It looks absolutely great but it was exhausting.

I tried for a faded red leather look on the hilt, but I messed it up and thought to correct it with a coat of Flesh Tearers Red. Which of course is such a strong color that it covered everything without leaving any highlights.

I highlighted it with a mix of Heavy Red and Dead White, then again by mixing in more Dead White.

Finally, I painted the sword black (no highlights) and the smoke rising from it dark green.

Finishing touches

Clean up any splodges and paint the feet area (which was immersed in white tack so the miniature would stand and be able to be primed) black. Spray varnish. Coat the sword flames in gloss varnish.