I was planning to do a kinda “normal” (read : boring) repaint of my Astray Red Frame to display alongside his blue twin : metallic red for the inner frame, gloss black for the outer armor, and some hints of gold here and there to break up the monotony. This color scheme has been done countless times in the past, but one has to admit it does look cool. Red and black look really good together, after all…

Then, THAT happened :

What ?!

When priming the inner frame (the plan was : gloss black > chrome > clear red), the black didn’t cover the red perfectly after the first coat. The right course of action here is to paint a second coat of gloss black before painting the chrome, but it just looks SO DAMN COOL I had to change my plans.

Since I painted the whole inner frame in one go, and everything reacted the same way, I decided to keep it like that :

I’ll just pretend that was on purpose…

Obviously I can’t keep the outer armor black now, so I’ll go full gold with some parts in metallic red to break it up a bit. I’ve ordered more gold since I’ll be painting about 3 times as many parts as initially planned.

Good thing I painted everything in one go…

I’m trying a new technique for the hands here. Usually, after separating the fingers I paint them individually. After that, I take a wild guess about which fingers go where… This time I tried to spread the fingers around so they can be evenly painted (hah !), but still attached to the hands. That seems to work, but it’s hard to tell with the way it’s painted here 🙂

There’s a part or two that aren’t as regular as the rest (like the sword scabbards below), but overall I’m satisfied with the result :

A bit black-heavy on the bottom here…

Shoulder part, looking good.

A waist part, looking REALLY good.

With this mistake, it’s the second time I’m achieving a good looking result because I messed up (to be fair here it’s not REALLY a mistake, only an unplanned result). Well, the parts look good individually when in direct sunlight, I hope it will still look good when everything’s assembled. If worst comes to worst, I can repaint it easily.

On a side note, I planned to try out some Alclad Candy Ruby Red for the metallic red. The spoon test showed it was WAY too pink for what I had planned. Oh well.