Finished War Walker squadron and start of my FW Avatar of Khaine painting log

Hi guys,

as you might remember from my last post I started painting my Alaitoc War Walkers and finally was able to finish them this week. Two are equipped with scatter lasers and one with missile launchers. I still have two scatter lasers lying around to equip them all the same, but I first like to try some mixing - some test games will show if 24 shots with the scatter lasers win over the higher utility you get through the added krak and plasma missiles. So here are the pics of the finished squadron :

Alaitoc Scout Squadron  Shadowspear

After finshing my War Walkers I made the oath to my Space Elves to finally paint the FW Avatar of Khaine that has been lying around my painting desk for over 18 months now - taunting me with his details and frightening me with spoiling this beautiful model with the strokes of my brushes. About a year ago I already did start painting him, but quickly found out that its hard to do such a model justice. I primed him black and started highlighting the model with brighter colors starting from a 1:1 mixture of scab red  with chaos black and ending at a 1:1 mixture of sunburst yellow with skull wite. Unfortunatly the resulting painted leg looked very dull and dark to me and didn´t really met the picture I had in mind for the Avatar (Sadly I didn´t take any pictures of it). 

Some months ago I painted a squad of Fire Dragons with reverse highlighting. There I primed the models white and painted them in ever darker tones of red. I really was pleased with the outcome on these models, so I tried the same approach on the same leg of the Avatar after priming him white again. I started with the whole leg painted in golden yellow and after that started highlighting with darker shades of blazing orange, blood red, red gore, scab red and at the end chaos black. This time I´m really pleased with the brightness of the colors and I will try to finsish the Avatars lava parts with this technique. So here is the pic of my second try on his leg :  

 

So what do you think - anyone also had similar  bad experiences with highlighting from black to brighter colors ?