One of the guys that works at the FLGS had an Autarch model he was looking to offload, so I offered to paint a model for him in exchange.
The model he chose was Prince Yriel of craftworld Iyanden, and all that he requested was that I stick somewhat similar to the colors that Games Workshop used. I kept with the general idea that was presented in his official picture – predominantly black armor with lots of yellow details and blue cloak. To be fully honest, though, I find GW’s scheme a bit busy, so I decided to reduce the number of colors. I excluded metallics entirely and focussed instead on making a pseudo-non-metallic-metal grey for a lot of the peices that are metal in his pictures.
I ended up quite happy with the results, and only put in something around 15 hours working on him – including cleaning his resin parts. Thankfully, the model had a decent cast, and the only defects were very minor.
I was almost a little sad to give him away after how well he turned out. Overall, I ended up not varnishing him since I was not sure what the intended recipient would want, and since I prefer to varnish before doing basing, he ended up with just a painted base.