Gokufan's Celestial Genesis: Uzeon

I picked the right arm rather than the body next because I thought it would be  a better place to figure out how I plan to paint the metal parts of the miniature. The arm has a good blend of mechanical and organic components, so it should give me a good idea of how the completed miniature will look.

I started by painting some of the organic areas in the same red-brown and blue-black colors I used on the tail.

From here, I started on the metallic areas. Uzeon has two main types of metallic components: armor plates and mysterious cylinders and tendrils.

For the armor plates I wanted an orangish color to contrast with the blue-black soft inner flesh and sort of mesh with the red-brown outer armored flesh. I basecoated the areas with a mix of hot orange and black. This created a sort of greenish tinted black, which wasn’t what I expected but I think it works so I went with it. From there, I blended in pure hot orange, followed by dark flesh tone and finally a bit of white for the highlights. I edge highlighted with a mix of white and dark flesh tone, although the orange parts on the arm are fairly round so there aren’t a great deal of edges.

For the cylinders and tendrils I went with a simple grey metal using black and white paint. I may come back and glaze in some other color to make them a bit more interesting, but I’m undecided at the moment.

Unfortunately I didn’t really get many shots of an individual metal part in process, but you can watch in this gallery as the metal areas sort of creep down the arm.

After laying down some metals I went back and painted more of the blue-black onto the arm. I then realized that “crystallizations” near the elbow and coming out of the elbow-orb exhaust port are actually feathers! Well, what are feathers but crystals growing out of birds and allegedly dinosaurs, right?

From here I finished up the arm by painting the green/blue/pruple crystal colors from the tail onto the remaining feathers.

The addition of the metal areas made the arm a lot more interesting to paint than the lower body and tail, I must say. Better variety of textures/components/colors to work with. Now that I’ve completed an arm I think I’ll move onto the body next to keep things interesting, rather than immediately painting the left arm.