Painting Soft steps and Daydreamer

I'd say painting adult Soft steps and Daydreamer, but I never painted their baby figures (except Soft steps' pupils). But, yes, that's who these two are!

First, eyes, for some reason. Soft steps' eyes are very pale, so I painted over them with white before giving them their correct colour, to cover well the orange. Daydreamer's eyes were, on closer inspection, a little off their intended placement, so I had to touch them up, too, despite not changing the colour, but it would have bothered me otherwise. Both have glow-in-the-dark paint on their eyes - Daydreamer as a thin line around the pupil (not visible in normal lighting because it's translucent and close to the yellow in colour), and Soft steps over the entire iris.

Like with Tumult, I also covered up Soft steps' epoxy putty additions, and the dark stripes where I'll paint her base colour instead, with off-white before starting on her actual colours.

Daydreamer's figure's brown stripes are part of the character's design now, as they blend so well into the dark brown back eir design already had. And also help give the design a bit more detail now that it's in bigger size, having started out as a design for a tiny minifigure.

The warm yellow of the figure is an excellent "canvas" colour, so most of Daydreamer's colour additions didn't need many coats to be opaque enough, and I also wanted eir colours to be more gradient instead of having hard borders, to match the mini, so I used watered down paint here and drybrushing there, not really building solid colour surfaces much. Some of the figure's plastic colour is still visible on the finished figure, but I also added some orange, lighter yellow, and a lighter underbelly colour that covers more than the figure's original one did.

Soft steps, on the other hand, needed lots of coats to build dark brown on top of white. Her underbelly has the fewest, but her base colour took... 4½? layers to become opaque before drybrushing some colour variation to it with several shades of lighter purple-brown. I used watered-down paint to not have it dry streaky and to keep the layers thin. Her stripes are mostly where the figure was already dark, or painted on top of the base colour, but they, too, needed multiple coats.

Also slightly visible here is that I gave them both pink lower gums to give their mouths a bit more detail. On Soft steps especially it would have stood out to just leave the inside of her lower jaw white around the teeth. And I touched up Daydreamer's teeth and tongue because the tongue's factory paint was a little off-center.

Soft steps got to keep the colour of her toe claws, and I painted the rest to match, but I made Daydreamer's claws darker and shinier, with purple-black and a thin coat of metallic blue on top of that.

Soft steps also eventually got some shinies in the form of small dots of metallic copper paint on her stripes and scutes. Meripihka's sparkly resin stains may not be a genetic trait, but all her kids get something equally fancy regardless. :)

On Daydreamer only the brown and black stripes (and brown scutes) have hard borders between scale colours, so I touched up the brown stripes after painting the various gradients, as some of the stripes inevitably got covered a little in the process, and I painted the black stripes last.

Daydreamer is already done and waiting back on the shelf, but Soft steps is still getting more paint coats. She likes to take her time, after all, like she did already at hatching. But ey did return to the painting table when it was time for finishing touches, to give both tiny shine dots on their eyes. Soft steps' pupils are so thin I wasn't sure I'd add those to her, but I managed to fit them where they don't get in the way of the glow.

Now that they're finished, you can find photos of the figures here at my site. I've also updated their character profiles to include their new looks and life developments.