Soda Pop - Sebastian Cross and Rook

Well I think I finished this bad boy in record time and let me tell you that is no easy feat! Sebastian is HUGE compared to the other soda pop miniatures i've painted.

So my boyfriend encouraged me to try to paint something with metallic paints. Now this is a big deal since i've been shying away from metallics since i've started playing around with NMM painting.  Just recently Miniature Mentor came out with a metallic painting tutorial and it was fabulous and helped push me in the direction with metallics I would be happy with and enjoy painting.  It was basically painting the same way I would with regular opaque paints and adding washes to enhance the colors and shading.
I had to take the miniature on one limb at a time due to the hugeness of him, which seemed to work out well.
I used all Vallejo paints both game and model colors combined and made washes out of the opaque paints I thought would work well.  I use PP mixing medium to make washes and while blending to prevent spot marks/rings and to release the surface tension of the paint so I don't have to press as hard when painting.
I used smokey ink for the browns, and a dark purple mixed with a dark silver for the shading.  For the highlights I used a light blue mixed in with a super light silver.  I avoided using any white to avoid making the metals look pastel.
As for the Gold I used 3 different golds and smokey ink as well as a bit of green to get the right look.

Little Rook was my testing grounds for the colors and you can see that I used some whites in with the silver to highlight and I think it worked fine on something as small as him but I didn't want to put it on the large mech.
I also experimented with glowing objects and I'm not sure i've got it yet i think i need to look at some more references and practice a bit more but I'll get there.
The base detail I sculpted right on top of the base he came with. I wanted to give it a tiled court yard feel so that the impression that he is protecting a sacred place.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the way he came out.