Clawed Fiend in one week - part 1

My local GW store has monthly paint competitions and this month's was monsters and mounts. Basically any monster or mounted bike/beast (cavalry?) model, space marine rhino size or smaller. Initially I didn't feel like bothering with it but after going through a few models I found a Finecast Dark Eldar Clawed Friend I had bought a few years back. It doesn't fit into any of my armies but it's such a great model I really wanted to paint it. Unfortunately my current armies always seem to take precedence over fun projects so I forgot about it until I was doing a little cleaning this weekend. In an effort to get more minis painted I figured why not just power through it and get it done for next weekend.

As Finecast goes the model was in pretty good shape, only a handful of small bubbles needed filling and minimal greenstuff work on the arm and leg. I also opted to paint the tail separately, I wanted to use the airbrush as much as possible and I think it would have been in the way a little bit during zenithal highlights.

I built up the base using a single cork and some old GW basing slate then added a layer of Vallejo brown earth to fill gaps and add texture. I finished by sticking a few extra bits of slate into the brown earth to make the base as dynamic as possible. 

I painted the fiend himself using Thunderhawk Blue as a base color, then Incubi Darkness for shadows on the underside and finally Vallejo Light Green Blue for the highlights. The only additional colors were Screamer Pink for the stripes, and Coelia Greenshade over the fur areas of the model.

For his base I painted a foundation of Steel Legion Drab, then a shade of Rhinox Hide on recesses and undersides of rocks, and finally Tau Light Ochre on the top in a mottled pattern, hopefully to keep things looking natural.

Here's the result after day one.

If all goes as planned I'll have a finished model by Friday.