Painting Red...

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So, I received my first Warhammer figure painting commission. It's nothing serious, and I'm not getting paid other than the kid giving me another model I requested in trade for my "uber owsum pante skillz." He wants the trim on the pauldrons (the massive shoulder guards on Space Marines) to be red. As in bright red. Now, I had forgotten how hard red is to paint, colorize with, or really do anything with, other than make things look 20x cooler and go faster.

For my personal models I apply a gold undercoat, as the red I'm using is roughly a 50/50 mixture of red and gold. For the red of the wax on purity seals, I use a maroon color as a base, then paint the normal crimsony red over it. It seems to cover just fine in only a few coats. I discovered, as the above comic states, that apparently on larger surfaces the red doesn't like to cover the dark red and stays slightly muddy dark red. So I had painted one side like this and said "Okay, this is messed up. Well I'll just put a thin coat of white over it."

...That didn't work either, because red is so fickle that unless your white is 100% white, it will still be a somewhat muddy red. So then I put a thin layer of orange over it. The red seemed to like this, and I will be keeping that in mind. Unless, of course, my suspicions are true and once I look at it again with fresh eyes it will be more of a red-orange.

Moral of the story: Don't paint things red, unless you're working up from either pure white, or another warm color like orange. And I'm still unsure as to why my hair turned magenta rather than red last time...