Amiibos are pretty nifty, and despite not having a Wii U I like to collect them. Through a series of events, I ended up in possession of two Zelda amiibos. Inspired by some images floating around the internet, I decided to customize the second one with a new color palette, following the blue variant availble in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

All paints used are acrylic, mixed with a small bit of water. As there are lots of fine details, the addition of water is incredibly important so the paint is thin enough. This will mean at least two coats will be needed, however the extra steps give a much cleaner result.

To prepare the amiibo, I cleaned the surface with rubbing alcohol, trying to be careful about not exposing the base to the alcohol to prevent damage to the chip inside. I covered her face, hair, and pedestal with painters tape to protect them, and also temporarily covered her arms with the tape as well for while I was painting her body.

As it was less detailed, I started with the bodice. I started with the light blue, using the dark blue to clean up anything I destroyed in my wake. Once both were fully dry, I added the gold details with a very fine brush. At this time I also added the gold line that separates the bottom from the skirt. I knew I was going to have to go back over it after I painted the navy on, but it gave me a more defined edge to follow so I didn't risk getting an incredibly dark color on the light parts (as trying to cover it would have been nearly impossible should I make a mistake).

I painted the navy on over the entirety of the skirt, save for the banner on the front of the dress. All of the rest of the details were at least partially raised, so I could go back and paint them later without any other reference points. Because the skirt started out white and I was using thinned out paint, it took several coats to fully cover the skirt.

The banner is what took the most time, because none of the details on it were raised; all were simply printed on. This meant I had to free hand everything but the absolute edge of the banner (which was slightly raised from the skirt around 80% of it). To make this easier, I used my fine brush and painted all of the gold on first, slightly wider than the lines needed to be. I then used those lines as a guide for the background colors, and took them up to and slightly over the gold lines I had created to thin them out and give them the right shape while also keeping the color in the area it needed to be. There was a lot of back and forth in this area, switching between colors and the gold to get just the right shape and line thickness. Is there a better way? Probably, but it worked for me!

The decorations along the bottom were the most challenging, as they weren't a solid color and were supposed to follow an area that was raised just enough to trick me into thinking they'd be easy to trace, but not raised enough for that to be true. I did each piece individually, starting with the light blue and following it up with the purple, trying to follow the raised edges as much as possible. I used my fine brush to fill back in with dark blue to narrow some of the lines and clean up runaway spindles. All in all, not too shabby!