Help with colour scheme

[Angelus]

Hi everyone,
I am planning to restart my Lizardmen and that includes repainting some stuff that's already painted because the current ones are, well, horrible. The problem is that I have no idea on how to paint them! I've been looking around a bit at different forums for pics on other players LM armies for inspiration, but it hasn't really helped a lot.
I've been thinking about painting them to look like actual lizards, so no blue-painted ones like the official GW scheme.

I found these pictures and I think that the colours on that lizard is nice. Maybe I could base my scheme on those? Do any of you have any suggestions on which colours I should use? Preferably based on the foundation paints as they are easy to use when you want to paint thins quickly.

The other major idea I have is a desert based scheme with colours like those on the lizards in the pics below.
pic 1

pic 2

 

[Dumbledore]

My army has sandy bellies for all of the models. Prime dheneb stone, wash with thinned desert yellow, then highlight with bleached bone if you want to do it quickly. A wash of ogryn flesh can improve things. I went with blue scales for the saurus but was originally going to do green scales to make it more realistic. Blue just helps contrast all the gold better so I chose that. For green scales you could paint the area either with the green foundation or chatalan green (that's what I use for my skinks) then highlight or just paint the scales camo green. Then washing with thraka green probably helps that too. If you go for green a more earthy, redder gold is probably best, as well as redder browns for the leather. You can see how my skinks etc turned out in my sig.

 

[Angelus]

I like the sandy bellies, something like that might work if I do the desert scheme. Maybe a sandy colour based on brown/grey for bellies and a sandy colour built from red on the scales. If I go with that scheme I will probably make most of the ornaments in silver rather than gold as I have a feeling that it will look better.

 

[Dumbledore]

I considered that but the trouble I came up with is that you don't have contrasting colours then or even contrasting tones. Sandy is a soft orange and reds hardly contrast that. With sandy red, sandy yellow and silver then you have lots of light colours. You could make it work but I don't know how I would do it. I like to have some decent contrasts in there so that detail can be picked out from a distance and so the army is more vibrant yet harmonious. Good luck whatever you do, anyway.

 

[dhuan gor]

I'm thinking copper desert.
sandy orange belly and a sand like brown as scales.
but YOU are the painter YOU deside

 

[Angelus]

I'm aware of the lack of contrast in the desert scheme, that's what putting me off a bit with it. The green skin/brown scales scheme would probably look better on army level due to the contrasting colours.