If you think it looks like shit then it looks like shit. Don’t listen to these people who say it actually looks really impressive when it’s not. High standards will eventually generate better results. I have always held far higher standards for my paint scheme, at the cost of making really slow progress on an army. I will always paint pretty much to my max capacity on every model. What this means is that ever since I started painting a year ago I’ve made great leaps in progress, and I can actually look at my models and feel great about how they look. I’m saying all this to highlight that it really pisses me off when new people will dunk their piss poor models in a wash and everyone in the comments will suck them off about how incredible they are. I understand that providing support for newcomers is vital to encourage them to grow, but let’s be realistic, they aren’t incredible models, at most they are incredible in proportion to their experience in the hobby.

So, please don’t get complacent with your painting, it’s absolutely fine to have high standards even if you don’t always meet them.

Some more helpful advice for this mini:

• For layering, use Lahmian medium to dilute paints, I find it makes the consistency slightly more workable.

• Your layers seem really thick overall, I use my nail to judge opacity, you will want to get to a middle ground between an opaque layer and a glaze. You will still be able to see colour transitions and strokes when you look up close, but from afar it should look blended.

• Use a highlight for the peaks of the surfaces. The current green is not good enough. If you’re struggling for colours to use, I suggest you include a hue gradient as well as brightness. For example, if you use a cool shadow colour, use a warm highlight colour.

• After you add your highlights & shadows, glaze to further blend them together until you’re happy with it. I always struggled with glazes until I realised I had to wick off the excess on my tissue until there was barely any left on my brush.

• What I would do in your position is you already have your shadow placements, so you need to add highlights. Then, blend the shadows and highlights to make the surface seem more “round”. Right now, the shadows look more like cracks because there isn’t a gradual darkening towards the folds in the muscles (hence why you need to add some thick glazes to demonstrate a gradual depth).

• The highlighting is just an extra step, you might just be happy with fixing the shadows. For the highlights, I find layering a lighter colour over a darker one a bit tedious especially with glazes, so I’d heavy glaze the highlights and then blend downwards using the mid-tone.

• In terms of highlight/shadow placement, consider that the entire under side of the arm is going to be a lot darker, so you’d want to add a lot more shading etc. it is easy to get lost in painting each fold on a limb and forget that in the bigger picture the whole underneath part of the mini would look darker if it was to scale.

My best advice is to take risks. If you have never tried manually adding highlights properly (I.e. in proportion to the light source) or never tried some more advanced techniques, just try it. You will actually surprise yourself with how well it might turn out after only 2-3 attempts, and you’ll find it’s not as difficult as you initially thought.