Gokufan's Celestial Genesis: Uzeon

I’m starting with the lower body and tail, the largest of my subassemblies. While Uzeon has a ton of mechanical components, this section is interesting because it has none of that. There are 3 main components here: skin, organic armor plates, and crystallizations. This gives me lots of area to establish my color scheme for these parts prior to the more finicky NMM sections.

Looking at the his body I decide I’ll need to split the skin into two different colors, one  the inner parts of the body and another for the outer. This is pretty similar to the box art, and like with the box art I decide for a cool inner color and warm outer color. I also decide to use the same scheme on the plates.

I want the skin at least to be dark and desaturated, so I use black paint as a component of all the basecoats. For the inner skin I use black, light turqoise and basic skin tone. For the outer skin I use black, scarlet, and dark flesh tone (all paints are Vallejo model or game color unless otherwise specified).

Now that’s looking… lousy, honestly. I will say I was pleasantly surprised by scarlet+black creating a rich red brown. Not what I was expecting but quite nice, I’ll have to try it out on leather sometime. I decide to really punch up the color, and to add higher highlights and make them more directional.

That’s more like it. Now for the crystallizations. My original thinking for this model was raven inspired, so lots of black with a sheen of blues greens and purples. I didn’t end up going this way but I still like the idea for the crystals.

I basecoat them black, then add bits of flat green, dark prussian blue and hexed lichen (purple). I then highlight each by mixing in some basic skin tone. I follow this up with an edge highlight of basic skin tone. I will say the edges on the crystallizations are softer than I’d like, which makes edge highlighting a bit difficult (where exactly is the edge?)

There’s quite a lot of these so here’s a gallery of various stages of crystal progress. I also continue to work on the skin and plates as I had established them earlier.

I really like the way these are looking!… with the exception of the two horns on his back. I think I’ll come back to those later since I’m not really sure what to do with them.

Speaking of his back, here’s some progress shots of the brown skin/plates.

With that this section is pretty much done, back horns notwithstanding. I think I’ll paint one of his arms next, that should be a good change of pace.