Purple Swirl step by step

So a few people on various forums and in my gaming group have been asking how I do my purple and the free hand bits on my dark eldar. I'm trying to repeat this pattern on most of the units for this army, to create a strong theme.

Hopefully, some of these pictures should help.

Step One: Give it a good base coat with a mix of 3 parts liche purple and one part chaos black, get in al the cracks, make sure your paint is thinned down.

Step 2: Add an equal part codex grey, so now you've got 2 parts purple, 1 part black, and one part grey, to the same mix. Roughly paint about 3 mm of each plate edge, in a fairly liberal first highlight.

Step 3: Take the mix you had, and add a splash of white to it. Just enough to make a lilac kind of colour, which with be the first defining highlight. At this point, add an extra layer of free handed curls with a steady hand.

Step 4: Add more white, til you have basically grey, but with a hint of 'off purple' in it. Hard to describe this, but the best way to judge it, is if it looks like it will be just a bit to bright to match the purple already on the model, its about right. Pick out the very edges, in what GW call 'extreme highlights' Add yet other layer of tiny curls.

Step 5: Add one more splash of white, and with a steady hand, catch the very edges. Make sure your camera doesn't go yellow at this point...

Step 6: Finally, take skull white, and put a tiny drop of the previous mix into it. Dot this on to the end of every curve and spike on the armour, and every little curl.

Repeat on every plate...

Hope people find this useful, or at least interesting. I'm going to try get finished pictures of this thing up before the end of the week.

Thanks for checking this out.

Gonders