Sd Gyan - bling tests

This is one of projects for 2012 Mecha Contest, this is gonna be just a simple OOB Painted. Wasn't going to do anything in that category BUT my litlle brother asked me to paint it for him so here we go.

I started with the gold shoulder pad as I wanted to try out Vallejo Model Color Gold that i got from my GF.

first let's have a look at the plastic color for comparison

ugly yellowish gold wannabe, That just HAD to go. so i began, after doing a few minis and reading/watching a LOT of painting related stuff i decided to do it a bit diffrently this time

First i painted the whole piece in metalic brown

To tell you the truth i realy like it just like that but that wasn't the end,
After that i was care fully painting it with vallejo gold, but i left the deepest / darkest areas untouched

After that I did highlighting with Gold to make certain areas "pop" more - i mean edges, and top most parts that i wanted to shine a bit more

 Next step was to make a diffrence between "layers" of armor just to make it a little bit more interesting.
I just used tamiya semigloss black mixedwith future to get a kind of wash/filter / transparent smoke/

That's all that has been done so far, next will be the blade and all of those little ornaments.