Dark Elf Assassin Part 1

I've hit a bit of a wall on my other projects.  I'll see if I can make a breakthrough on some of them this weekend.  But during the week, when I only have a little time after work to paint, I'd rather do something I know I can make progress on.  So I decided to start on this Dark Elf from Scale75.  I had already prepped the figure while I was waiting for the aide-de-camp to arrive.

I went with a very pale skin, something I've been wanting to experiment with.  The skin is Dusky Skin, Dusky Skin Highlight, and Vampiric Skin.  I then applied some glazes, but I switched these up a bit.  Normally I'd use red in the cheeks and nose, blue on the jaw for stubble, and purple to deepen the shadows.  I skipped the stubble, that didn't seem to fit with an elf.  The other glazes I shifted more towards blue, so red became a reddish purple (2 parts red, 1 part blue) and the purple became a blueish purple (1 part red, 2 parts blue).  The red-purple glaze went on the cheeks, nose, knuckles, elbows.  The blue-purple went in the shadows on the face and shadows on the arms and hands.  I also used a bit of blue above the eyes and in a couple shadows for a little more variation.

For the clothing I thought an overall dark look would fit an assassin character.  The hood is Pure Black, Dusky Skin Shadow, and Dusky Skin.  I'm trying to decide if I want to keep the entire figure in that black-grey-white color scheme and just use hints of color through glazing.  Otherwise I'll just stick to dark colors (dark brown, dark purple, etc).

For the armor I'm taking a slightly different approach.  This time around I'm using inks to build up the shadows and some hints of color.  It's definitely a learning process.

 

Here's a closer look at the face and upper body.  It's a little easier to see the color variation from the glazes.  I tried to keep them subtle, as it's easy to overpower that light light skin.  The colors are a bit more noticeable in person.