Holo (Wolf and Spice) repaint

I knowingly bought a bootleg because I didn’t like the paint scheme of the figure, and didn’t want to pay $412 for one I was going to paint over completely. I’m appropriately ashamed. But look at this. The sculpt has all this interesting texture but the paint job doesn’t make use of it at all:

Most of her hair and tail are not even painted, just plain brown plastic. I particularly  dislike how they just lazily airbrushed some white gradient on her tail and the top of her head. That’s not how Holo looks:

nor how fur looks on real animals:

Aside from the fur, I think the paint scheme lacks contrast. Everything looks more or less the same tone.

I had a lot of fun painting the base, there’s a lot of textures there. Also added some “straw” to protect the apples:

The actual base was dull plastic and also splotchy, so I repainted it completely in a shiny metallic black.

Her tail didn’t even fit properly so I added some epoxy clay:

Color matching takes a bit of experience:

because the color changes a bit between wet and dry paint.

This is how she turned out, I decided to make her fur slightly darker for better contrast with her skin: