Neverborn Skin Tones

Painting a demon seems kind of boring to me.  Sure, when I was a kid, Chernabog was ominous in Fantasia. But fantasy lines are so rife with this BBG that I now find them commonplace, much less scary.  Red skin, big horns, goat's legs, Tim Curry's voice.  Next please...

So I avoided picking up Nephilim figures from Wyrd's Malifaux line.  It was too in the vein of what I was avoiding.  I thought the nightmares from Malifaux captured my imagination more.

But my "to be painted" collection started growing bunches of these Nephilim: Nekima. Tuco. Angel Eyes. The Scion of Black Blood. The Bloodwretches.  Stuck with them, I struggled on what to use for skin tones.  Especially since each of them have a slightly different background.

So to start, I picked the most unusual part of the their biology: Black Blood.  So what would a creature that had "black blood" look like?  The closest real "Earther" counterpart creatures with purple or violet blood.   Of these the most interesting palette I saw was this picture of the sipuncula or peanut worm.  The creature is interesting because different parts have different palettes based on how the camera captured its translucence.

Having recently picked up the 2nd Edition Core Through the Breach book, I got to read up a little on the history of Malifaux.  The planet starts off with human-like people.  Eventually they got to war with their greatest enemies - the Tyrants.  To defeat them, they turn their blood black - basically a defense mechanism similar to the Alien Xenomorphs.

The lore also talks about a ritual to turn a human into a Neverborn.  From some of the stories I've read, you can tell when someone doesn't look like an indigenous Neverborn who had existed in Malifaux before the Breach opened.  As such, a transformed human can still disguise him or herself a little among other humans.

So I'm classifying them as three types of creatures: Indigenous, Once Human, Mid-Transformation.

One thing I learned from painting the warpigs: A simple two-tone color scheme can have unexpected depth by using a a deeper or darker undercoat and then a heavy glaze of a lighter color for the base coat.  Here the shadow is a third color on the undersides of the model. Final highlighting would be a white skin tone that had little-to-no red in it - probably a linen, recalling the Jen Haley tutorials.
So terms I'm using for this process are: Undercoat, Shadow (Wash), Base (Heavy Glaze).

One specific thing regarding the term "undercoat": I'm still priming white, uniform grey, or black - and THEN applying what I'm calling "undercoat".  (I recognize a prime coat is technically an undercoat, but whatever...)

So I'm breaking out skin tones in three sections:

• Indigenous (e.g., Nekima and the Scion) would have a more blue/purple skin tone than a human one.  The males have a deeper purple undercoat - Reaper HD Twilight Purple.  The females slightly brighter purple - Reaper HD Gem Purple.  Base coats will be straight Linen color.  No fleshtones - like Caucasian.
• Once Human (e.g., Tuco and Angel Eyes) may still retain a little of the human skin tone.  Reapers Dusky Skin tone might work as a undercoat base with an base of the Reaper Caucasian fleshtones, with final highlights being Linen.
• Mid-Transformation (e.g. Bloodwretches) would still retain more of that Caucasian skin tone with blends in the Once Human in the extremities - similar to the Swine-Cursed.