Painting a Leader for the Tau Soldiers

As promised I post here my work on the headless guy who will be the leader of the Tau unit I was painting in the previous post.

Headless starting point

 Since I got my miniatures as second hand, this poor guy came already primed in black but missing the head.
I found one which was not the helmet one of the regular Tau soldiers, but a normal, "naked" head, so I liked to have him as fearless leader, kind of bad-ass who does not need any helmet or computer assisted targeting or things like that.
I glued the head to the figure and since the head was not primed, I used Citadel Imperial Primer applied with a brush.
First, I must say that I do not like the product. I got it because I needed something to prime a miniature without using a spray as I intended to prime a miniature for my daughter so that she could be able to try to paint one right away. The first time that I tried to use the primer, it didn't seem to work, it was very liquid and was not covering the miniature at all, even after shaking it several times.
At the end, I solved the issue by taking a wooden little stick and stirring the product inside the recipient. This helped but it was still not doing its job very good.
With this guy, however, I was already aware of the issue with the primer, so I stirred it with the wooden tool before applying and was prepared to get a non uniform application if the primer, which is not so bad if you consider that in this way the primer is also giving me some shadows in the face as you can see in the pictures.

 

After that I just applied the base colours with the idea of following the quick method of base colour + wash ---> ready (more or less)
The colours I used were mostly from the Citadel Base Painting Set:
Macragge Blue for the armour,
Balthasar Gold for the rifle, backpack and implant in the head,
Mephiston Red for the hair,
Waaagh! Flesh for the trousers and arms and gloves, and
Vallejo Sombre Grey 72.048 for the head and feet/boots.

Please note the difference in the colour of the trousers, arms and gloves between the leader and any one of the other Tau soldiers:

After applying the base colours I proceeded to give it the same wash treatment as with the rest of the Tau soldiers, namely the Vallejo 73.207 Blue Wash
Here is the result in pictures:

I "highlighted" the eyes with some extra deep colour there

Here you can see a comparison between the leader and one soldier and this point in the painting process:

And this will be the comparison between the leader at this moment and the regular Tau soldier already finished:

As soon as I have some spare time I intent to give this guy some dry brush and see how it turns out.
So far I think it looks quite nice although, for some reason, the image of him I was having in my mind when I started working on him does not correspond to the result so far...

Hope I can post an update soon.