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I'm working on shading and highlighting and having a bit of trouble with smaller areas, like muscles. Any tips/advice? Also, tips on taking good pics of minis are welcome.

Currently I am going through the second Reaper Bones Learn-to-Paint kits (which are AWESOME!) that teaches shading and blending. What I'm wondering now is what are some guidelines about when to shade and blend and when to dry brush?

Upon priming and placing my Bones Great Worm on a temporary working base I came to notice something that didn't fully occur to me beforehand. My normal working base choice is the lid to a dip can; awful habit, I know, but the tins make great rinse reservoirs and the lids are great for basing and a crude dry palette... I digress. Anyway, I ended up mounting the worm on a beverage bottle, which placed on my desk, and me seated in front of said desk, brought Mr. Worm to about eye level. I noticed that his model casts a pretty serious shadow on a fair portion of the front of his body, something I knew, but didn't really notice to what degree until I was looking at him eye-to-maw. So! My question is, for models that cast their own shadow, how do you approach shading that area? I can think of two basic approaches here. Either A: I ignore the fact that he's creating his own shade, and treat the entire underside uniformly, or B: I can move him and the light around until I get something I like, mentally bookmark it or even outline it, and actively paint-shade that area, so that no matter what light this guy is viewed in or from what angle, he'll appear to be casting shade on himself. Or of course, C: somewhere in between. TL;DR, would you shade areas 1 and 2 in this picture the same or differently?

So I have a nice stock of Reaper inks, which is cool. And I've used them before to brilliant effect. Love 'em. With that said, I'm painting a Behir for my ongoing S4 AD&D game. On the cover, the beastie has a decidedly teal/blue-green belly. For reference here's a similar critter in Reaper's catalog, the Cavern Crawler: (WAY better looking than all the "official" offerings from D&D Minis or GF9 - they're both too fat!) Anyway... I'm using the Ocean triad to get the shade of blue I want (Deep Ocean, Marine Teal, Surf Aqua, 9076, -77 and -78, respectively) and I'm wondering about shading with an ink. I've got both Blue Ink and Green Ink...which do you guys think will work better for the traditional S4/Monster Manual II Behir, blue or green? Or should I do a wash of Deep Ocean instead, and base with Marine Teal and highlight with Surf Aqua and a final highlight of 50/50 Surf Aqua + Pure White? I just don't wanna get in there and start putting blue ink on and everything get stained navy blue, or green and everything go all grass colored on me.

I am working on a Geiger deep dragon from Valiant miniatures for my son. The problem i have is that I want to keep the wings and dragon very dark. At the same time there is a lot of detail on the wings and body that I want to highlight. every time I have tried this in the past I have wound up with a color much lighter than I was shooting for. suggestions and advice would be very welcome. This applies in particular to the wings. Can anyone give me a hand? Picture of the dragon included. Thanks for any assistance!