Shading a Warhammer 40K Razorback

I'm doing a quick build of a Warhammer 40K Razorback that I got last week. I've built a few Warhammer figures but this is my first Razorback so I'm kind of excited.

Today, I did some shading using red as a contrast to the base blue.

Base blue with some lighter shades airbrushed

Above is the base Space Marine blue with some lighter shade on the highlights. This far was done by airbrush. I added some Tamiya buff to the blue to lighten while keeping the color integrity. White sometimes gives the blue a pastel look that loses intensity. Finally I used a light coat of buff at low pressure to add a layer if dust to the lower part of the Razorback. This will be augmented with weathering pigments.

Buff dusting

And now comes the fun part: adding pinpoint red dots to create a filter.

Red dots

Here I added some pinpoint dots of Vallejo Basic Red. There's two ways to apply these. You can do "wet on wet" where you wet the surface before applying the paint or "wet on dry" where you apply the paint to dry surface. I like the latter for better control. Unfortunately, fumbling with the camera allowed the paint to dry a bit so I had to wet the brush a bit.

 

I wet the brush a bit because the paint was a bit dry. Try to stimple the paint toward the corners. 

Repeat the pinpoint dots and mixing on all the corners and recesses. 

 Above you can see the Razorback with all the corners done. It may look a bit over done now, but after more weathering and detailing the purple shades will melt right into the vehicle. If this was a larger scale vehicle (1/35 scale) and/or if I was feeling a little braver I'd add some more filters of yellow and orange to spruce up some of this flat planes, but I don't know if I'm feeling it. Oh, who am I kidding? I'll probably do some yellow filters anyway on the highlight areas.