HQ12-02 Race Queen [WIP - Mixing Pantone Color of the Year 2016 and Painting Basecoats for Racing Attire]

At this early stage of the Race Queen attire I sought only to apply the mid-tones of the clothing's color scheme, which in my way of doing things is synonymous with the basecoat layer. As to the colors themselves, I went for a previously used combination namely the Pantone Color of the Year 2016 comprising Rose Quartz and Serenity. The Vallejo Model Color rough equivalents are 70.944 Old Rose and 70.902 Azure respectively (both tinted with 70.951 White).  

atelier iT 1/12 scale Race Queen work-in-progress: Preliminary basecoats for her racing attire

At this stage the racing attire basecoat colors have yet to painted with their shadows and highlight

Shadows for the mid-tones will play a big part in the added accuracy as well as an even closer match to the Pantone Color of the Year 2016. Such shading can be created by adding either small amounts of 70.958 Pink to 70.944 Old Rose and/or an Old Rose/White mixture; and 70.839 Ultramarine to 70.902 Azure and/or an Azure/White mixture. I'll expound on this in the next Race Queen update. At this point in time I applied the mid-tones to see if the general color scheme fits her skin tone. 

A trial and error process towards achieving a close match for the Pantone Color of the Year 2016 

Because of her fairly large size, the 1/12 scale Race Queen tends to react with light much more naturally when compared to the tinier 1/60 or even 1/144 scale figurines I've worked with before. What this essentially means is that the Race Queen will require less contrasting of hues i.e. lighter shadows and darker highlights, and let natural lighting effects take care of the rest. Of course adding different hues to the basecoat colors will make the color scheme more aesthetically pleasing. However care must be taken not to overdo the contrasting, especially in larger scale figurines.     

Pantone Color of the Year 2016 - Rose Quartz and Serenity

As alluded to earlier, I had used this color combination before on an earlier project. But back then I wasn't too particular about how close a match the painted colors were to the real thing. This time I did so I tried my best to get as close to the actual Pantone colors as I could.

All important mid-tone of the Race Queen's attire is now done and it awaits shadows and highlights

Sadly the photos above don't really do justice to how close the painted basecoat colors do indeed match the Pantone Rose Quartz and Serenity hues, to the naked eye. There are just too many variables involved, some controllable some not, ranging from photography lighting to camera settings to PC/laptop color display settings and monitor quality. Even if every aforementioned variable is set to perfection the colors still might not look right to an observer with an uncalibrated electronic display incapable of handling high color accuracy. So you will just have to take my word for it.