Painting Hotaru

This weekend's goal: paint the figure. Unfortunately, I know nothing about paints. All I did know was that whatever I buy better be cheap and effective. I decided to choose some semi-viscous paint, with the consistency of paint you'd buy from a hardware store, maybe more viscous, with the goal of being able to hide small flaws in the surface. Terrible choice, as I should have gotten a more viscous mix. Anyways, for 4 dollars, I got a big ass bottle of economy priced white acrylic.
Yeah. Really big bottle, perhaps overkill. I'm never going to use this up. Ah well.

The second element was selecting a proper color to give the skin tone a less alien/abnormal color. Fortunately, I found "Portrait Tone" paint for the "bargain" price of 7 dollars. I could have probably gotten away with something much smaller in quantity.

This bottle should last me several hundred projects. I ended up using 1/20th of the bottle or less. I couldn't tell you how exactly, but I somehow accidentally added enough white acrylic to get the proper tone I wanted.Anyways, I dumped the paint into a Styrofoam cup and went to work.

"Good, god, J. Norad, what the hell are you doing? That looks terrible." -Hotaru

Indeed, using a Styrofoam cup was asking for trouble, so I cut it in half and augmented it to be "no-spill". After about two hours of unscrewing bolts, painting, and rescrewing the bolts, the job was done. The figure was semi-properly sanded down before applying paint, but some areas just had to deal with awkwardly layered cardstock making a weird surface. I probably should have done a better job, but hey, this was my first time painting anything other than a wall.

The end result is a much better head, with paint hiding some of the seams. I still have to get the hands and feet properly done before I attempt to paint those. There's also a need of a bit of retouching on the whites of the eyes, as the portrait tone mix got a bit in there while trying to get an even coat on the head.