For my first Golden Hat XXXVIII entry I painted “Iron Steve” from the Greebo Dwarvageddoom campaign.
I have focussed on painting quantity for quite a while now, and while I am perfectly fine with my tabletop standard and newly used battle-ready standard, it has been a long time since I took my time with a single model - and I have neglected training that particular muscle far too long!
Since this was a Golden Hat, I really wanted to leave my comfort zone with this model. And that meant three main things: trying to paint that flame, making use of that large canvas which is his cloak and make his skin more interesting by giving him appropriately rocky tattoos, all of which would be “firsts” for me.
I am quite fond of how it all turned out, the flames look nice from behind (the front is nice enough, but I don’t reaaaally like how the flames are modelled there, backside is much nicer) and the freehand coat came out good. It was truly a thrilling experience, and an area where there is a tremendous learning curve ahead of me, especially the gap from how I imagine stuff and how I am actually able to paint it 
I decided very quickly on a skull, heavily inspired by a Squidmar video. I wanted to have it surrounded by roses, which in the end was much harder than I thought and actually more difficult than the skull. In my mind I saw a dense group of high-detail roses, similar to something like this. But my skill level was nowhere near being able to paint it 
I therefore decided on something a little more abstract, which turned out not half bad.
I anyway wanted to paint rose-thorn-vine kind of things on his arms, so I just continued that element on his cloak. I think the coat turned out better than the arms, I should have made the tattoos really go around his arms instead of staying on the visible surface, but I realised the mistake too late. The hazard-striped hose was one of the first things I decided on, that was a total no-brainer for me
I am quite happy with the base, which I did in a way I wanted to do for a long time. I always wanted to try using the citadel texture paints over a layer of paint so it stays visible in the cracks. I was not 100% sure it would work, but thankfully it did and it looks pretty rad, if I might say so myself. Especially considering it’s basically no work at all! I liberally slapped red paint on the base and mixed it randomly with orange and yellow directly on the base. Then it’s just the regular thick coat of texture paint (Mordant Earth, in this case) and that’s it. I actually liked the stage before the texture paint already, gives off a psychedelic vibe
And here he is, the bass player of “Flowers is for Elvsess” (with a grateful nod to @Abecedar, I think about that phrase at least once a week )
