Domaru Butai = Bananaman in Japanese?

Konichiwa! A week since my last post and my Domaru Butai now has some colour.

I have gone for a yellow and blue scheme on him (I changed my mind from the red and white I mentioned a few posts ago - he's gone from the Marlboro Man to Bananaman...) and am pretty chuffed with how he is turning out so far. Lots and lots of layers, to gradually build up the colour, but it seems to be working. Yellow is usually a bit of a bane of mine (I suspect thats one of the reasons I chose it - just to torture myself) so I thought I'd mention a few of the colours I used in more detail.

I have tried to use a little colour theory here and had a go at shading with a contrasting colour. In this instance, the opposite to yellow on my colour chart is purple, so I started off my base coating most of the armour in GW Foundation Iyanden Darkson, and then added progressively more Vallejo Model Colour (VMC) Purple to the mix. Each stage I would layer on a few more layers getting deeper into the recesses.

Once I got to pure purple, I started working with Reaper Master Series (RMS) Redstone Shadow and applied a number of glazes deep into the shadows. Adding the very dark orange into the deepest shadows here takes me back towards yellow again but should also give me a nice contrast with the dark blue I will be using elsewhere.

At some point I blocked in some dark blue, just to see how it was looking. This was mainly curiosity, but it also meant that some of the dark colour was already in place so when I come back to it there is less likelihood of me daubing dark blue paint over a lovingly shaded and highlighted yellow suit of armour...!

I then highlighted by adding VMC Light Yellow to the Iyandon Darkson and gradually built up some highlights on the upper edges of the model. Both the shading and the highlighting was done with a zenithal method in mind with a diffuse overhead light source. The last thing I did was glaze a super-thin wash of the VERY old GW yellow ink over all of the armour. This brought all the colours together and smoothed out any rough highlighting. I do intent to re-highlight in Light Yellow and also apply some spot white highlights to some sharp edges to really make it 'pop'.

Here are some more photos: