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So, I've dug out a mini to paint up for the same Hobby Hangout contest that Ub3r is entering. Flying Frog Games' Shadows of Brimstone: Guardian of Targa. We all know how bad I suck at keeping up WIPs, but I'll try to post as I go. This is what it looks like: I'm kidding. It's the guy on the left, here: I've just finished cleaning and assembling mine, and as you can see, I had to do some filling on the base...which I tried to cover up with some bits, since I can't sculpt. It's on a Secret Weapon Trash base, 60mm, beveled. (Bleh for beveled edge bases, but it's all I had that fits the theme I'm going for.) As you can see in the tags, I'm going to be doing some heavy weathering and some OSL in this project. Stay tuned.

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 am painting my first 54mm I am using the "vampire skin" triad with maggot white as a hightlight and nightmare black as a shadow. I feel like there should be another colors in the shadows but I don't know what. This is just a quick sketch of what color is going where and I am not 100% on the color yet. I also lost a bunch of the shadows that should be on the lowet legs so they need to be added in. The base will be brown with aged yellowish skulls.

I found this article on deviantArt a while back, didn't give it much mind, but then it came back to me and I thought it might be a useful resource for beginer painters, or even old hands.