Champion Of Nurgle Stage 3: Fly Head and Mutated Leg 1

This is the stage where I really dropped myself into it. It has been quite a few years since I painted miniatures, let alone tried to pull off some advanced techniques like I planned to do on the fly mutations.

Following a suggestion by a friend of mine I looked up some image reference on the internet of bluebottle flies and the iridescence of their carapace.
They basically look like oil slicks, metallic with a multicoloured hue. I wasn't keen on actually painting these parts on the miniature with metallic paints, but I did want to somehow bring across that multicoloured quality.

I decided to paint the areas black and then highlight them in three colours, dark blue, green and purple. By concentrating on the edges of the carapace and leaving the smooth central areas almost black this should give the impression of depth. The plan was to concentrate the different colours in set areas on each piece of the carapace, blue at the top edge, green at the bottom left edge and purple at the bottom right. I was also playing with giving the whole area a coat of gloss varnish afterwards, but had not decided at this stage.

This paint effect was very daunting to me. I've mentioned in a previous post that my eyesight is going a bit and it's sometimes quite hard for me to see very small details. Because of this I decided to do an initial few highlights of Vallejo Dark Prussian Blue mixed with increasing amounts of Azure just to get the basic blue down and to help me see the details better.

I wasn't too worried about the gaps between the armour plates at this stage because I planned to line them in with black before the final few highlights.
It did become apparent to me that doing the carapace in three colours  was perhaps a bit too much so I decided to drop the purple from the plan.I added the green colour to the plates using Citadel Emerald Green (an old colour) ready for the highlighting process.

The next stages would be to start highlighting both colours on the head and leg. I was planning to do this using the same highlight colour to mix into the green and the blue, the afore-mentioned Vallejo Azure. I also started to play with the ideas for the scenic base.