I started with the “Girl.” Once I had her parts ready to go, I had to make a choice. With doing girl kits there is always the question is how to paint them and where to start. Soldat made it easy. Since all the parts were at natural seams I decided to paint the body flesh tones first with the arms and legs not yet attached. I used, as I always do for figures, Model Master’s flesh tone system that works well for figure kits that the colors can be airbrushed. Usually, anything 90 mm or bigger can be airbrushed. Smaller scales get difficult to airbrush effectively and other techniques work much better for those smaller scales.

 In any event, I airbrush a base coat of MM “Flesh Base” down then I alternate that MM tone and shading color between to build the depth and tones in the skin. Some times going back to the base with light mist to lighten the tones up. There can be thirty to fifty lightly applied coats of color on a finished skin tone to get the depths and tones down. Layering smaller and smaller amounts of paint down as I go. I have been impressed with this system only four colors are all you need to do most any skin tones. Depending on the subject, making the tones lighter or dark by how heavy you use the toning and shading colors is easy.

There is also a dark “shadowing” color, but I don’t use it often, especially on fair skinned vampire girls.  I just repeat the steps as necessary: base . . . tone . . . shade, base, tone, shade until I am satisfied with the appearance of the skin. I often refer to the great fantasy artists’ Julie Bell, Boris Vallejo, Luis Royo, and Sorayama work as guides when working with skin tones on girls. Females are, in fact, the hardest to do. Males tend to have defined muscles making them easier to paint, where as females need a bit more finesse softer and subtle tones for them to look right. It’s just the way it is, so you cannot be too heavy handed when painting them.    

 When I do a kit like this I don’t worry about over spray, and in this, I did not mask off anything when shooting the skin tones. I find that doing the skin first is much easier, and the results look better when you’re not worried about getting skin color on the cloths, masking off sections, or being forced to cut a pass short. By time I am done the figure is usually covered entirely with skin colors.  After I am happy with the skin color I go back and detail the rest of the figure, eyes, clothes, jewelry, etc.

 She is a vampire and red or black are the logical colors to use on her outfit, but you can use whatever you like. I, arbitrary, picked the color red for Karenstein’s clothes. I mixed up some semi gloss red, MM flat red and gloss red, to give her attire more of a leather look then a vinyl look. Once dried I went back over it with some thinned Detail Master Black out to highlight the wrinkles in her boots, gloves and suit.