Next update! (It is hugely long, so if you don´t have time and want to read it all at once save if for later)
So as I promised now onto all the painting. I will explain step by step all the painting. The trees looks like this after the painting (missing the stones on the big and small ones)
As I said I did prime for two reasons: I didn´t know if the paint was going to hold properly on the superglue I used to stick the lianas with and because I wanted to add some extra grip to the sand on the base. I chose black so I could keep more easily the dark color that the lack of light would cause. Having said this I didn´t go as fancy on the trunk painting as I had described. I initially thought that I would only achieve a good look with many layers of paint and it turned out to be opposite: I ended up applying a basecoat and a lone drybrush and the more I look at it the more I think lots of paint would have made it worse.
The trunk
As you can see this was the first color to be applied. I wanted to get a very dark brown basecoat and none of the already made stuff I had was what i wanted, so I decided to made my own by mixing. I didn´t measure the ration exactly as I just added a bit of paint, mixed and adde some more over and over until I got the color I was searching for. Also, I´ll say it is important to know that when paint is still wet it looks a bit lighter than it will actually look like once it´s dried, I made this mistake but was happier with the result, so there´s no problem with that; just saying for a thing to watch out (and also have it written somewhere to remind myself when I forget about it

). What I did for the recipe is:
- Mix some of the brown with the black. I should say that the brown is a earth tone, and that it is also diluted, while the black I used is a very concentrated paint and so even though I mixed them about at a 1:1 ratio it is for sure no the same for colors of other brands. The color you are searching at this point for is a very dark grey that doesn't almost look like containing brown.
- After the color loss I thought the best way to bring it back was to add some red and green, as brown was red+black. The amount I added onto the grey mixture were 4 drops of red and 1 of green. I have no idea about the volume of grey paint I had, but if I had to say something it covered about 1 quarter o fate plate I used to mix it at a quarter of a cm high. Im sorry to give you such poor measures but this is all I have, maybe with the next trees I can work out the ratio better
.
I t is also important to say that i din´t water the paint down at any moment, so it was pretty thick. This made it somewhat harder to apply, but it allowed me to stipple it right when I finished painting the basecoat, which gave me a very very nice texture to do the dry brush on. (And so I realized all the time I had spent making texture on the clay could have been avoided

). Also, if you noticed I also painted both the explorer and the snake, just to not waste the paint

, just telling because it may have affected the way the explorer turned out.
Next was a drybrush of the same brown I used for the mix. I decided to go onto a
VERY gentle drybrush and some different strikes in different directions to try to pick out the texture I had made with the basecoat. It is also important to pick out the detail in between the buttresses so they don´t look incredibly shiny, and make sure the brush is missing mostly all of its paint so you don´t paint over any texture (this happened to me some times and it looks real bad, I´ll cover them with some foliage material. Example of the bark texture:
The details
The snake
This one was very simple:
mepiston red basecoat,
abbadon black strives, and
overland sunset lines where the two colors met. Then an
agrax earthshade wash and then some highlights with the same colors as the base coat ones.
The unfortunate explorer
He consisted of 6 different areas. They were all done the same way: The base coat and once all were done two light washes of
agrax earthshade.
- The white shirt: Celestra grey basecoat. No more mystery for it.
- The grey pants: I applied a mechanicus standard grey basecoat and then a semi-heavy nuln oil wash to darken it.
- The leather: Mourfang brown.
- The red dagger: Mephiston red, I did it at the same time as the skane
- The metal: Boltgun metal base, heavy nuln oil wash and a orange wash made from troll slayer orange and lahmian medium. (the metallic bits are the sword and the armor he´s got on his right arm.
- The skin. Started with an old foundation paint I had around (Reikland fleshshade). Then I washed the places around the vein a couple of times with watered down nuln oil and after the agrax earthshade wash i applied a bit of very watered down mephiston red to give it a bit of color. After that I put some pallid witch flesh on the eyes and teeth and some strikes of snakebite leather (again an old paint) on the hair, eyebrows and mustache.
Close up of the face:
The sand
Small thing but still
gonna share it
. Mourfang brown base coat. With this
one I didn´t really want to get that of a strong color, so what I did is to take some paint straight out of the
pot and rapidly dread
it around, and then I dipped my brush
in water and put it on top of the paint to help it get in the sand. The reason I didn´t mix it on a pallet was because I wanted uneven quantities of pigment in different areas so the earth would look better, and I didn´t have to preoccupy myself with spreading the paint around

. Then I lightly was the sand with
agrax earthshade to knock it down onto dark again, as I didn´t want the tree to be much darker than the sand. Also, next time I´ll paint the sand fist and then the details because it is real hard to get the paint on the sand without painting on the details. Thankfully I managed, but it was a pain. Then I drybrushed codex grey on the small rocks
to make them more visible.
The lianas
I only painted the hanging parts of them because I really liked how they looked in brown. I used
Castellan green and then washed them with
agrax earthshade. The picture shows it with out the wash.
So now I am only missing the foliage and it will final be done! Reall looking forward to do it but again homework will keep me busy this weekend (
@Crowsfoot I´d really like to change priorities, but I still live under the rule of my mum and I don´t think she´ll be very happy about that

) so I honestly have no idea how much will I be able to do, so better not say any date so I won´t have to call myself a liar

.
Also one question guys. Reading through the post agin I noticed it is real long, which can bore someone or simply making them not bothering to read and I thought that maybe If I updated more often I´d avoid that. So the question is if you guys prefer to have long posts sometimes or to get smaller updates more often. I really don´t mind it´s up to you.
All what I said in the previous posts, feedback, ideas, criticism, doubts (,asking for more pics,) and all please post it.
Enjoy
Jorgik