I've made only a little bit of progress since I took this shot. The suckers on the end of the lash have their basecoat and primer... otherwise I've been too busy to paint.
The banner was accomplished using a decoupage technique and thus isn't actually freehand. I will be reusing the technique just about as often as I can. I only had to use some putty to smooth out the edges where the paper was still higher than the banner. With a different banner it wouldn't have been an issue.
I have decided not to give the cape additional highlights. I will let the base colour and shading stand alone -- at least until the rest of the model is completely finished. At the moment I really think that the darker colour does a good job of framing the model.
While planning my Ork army I decided to let the Relic News Community Forum folks decide which of my abandoned projects I should get back to first -- this one took an early and decisive lead.
Given that this is a command unit dedicated to Slaanesh, the Chaos force of pleasure, I decided I wanted to stay well away from "typical" Chaos colours. Since pink is usually used for Slaanesh I went for a pink and light green primary palette with a vibrant fuscia/purple accent. I used white for all of the trim to help reinforce the washed out, bright colour palette.
The pink/white scheme will also be carried over to a banner on his back, taken from the WFB Slaanesh Champion, with a white background and a pink Daemonette.
This has been a great project for blending practice as I go from such dark shades to pure white highlights on the bulk of the model. I also really enjoy the extraneous Chaos details in these models.