Textured material - approach 1

Today I'll try to show you how I painted texture on the red cloth around Grinder's hair, and recreate the same effect on a blue mantle.

First I'll tell you how I achieved this texture on Grinder and them I'll try to do step-by-step on the Wraith and Viking, as the used technique may vary a little.

Red cloth:
At the beginning I was going for plain and smooth red, so I basically did all the lights and shadows as smooth as possible. Then I noticed that it doesn't look good enough, especially next to the leather elements. Besides with this scale it's almost a sin not to try some freehands.
Because I noticed that foldes and recesses of the cloth look almost like feathers, first I was thinking about emphasizing it with adequate freehand, but I was worried that it may look too girly, so finally decided against it. Then I tought about simple fabric pattern. It shouldn't be to difficult to do, and should look real/believable enough.

Because I had only a general idea how to achieve desirable effect I simply jumped into a deep water and took the brush with a bit of 'Jack Bone (P3) and started to paint thin lines on the brightest parts of the cloth.
Why 'Jack Bone? No idea, honestly. I guess it might be simply because it was already on the table and I was to lazy to look for off-white. I trully doubt there was any clear thought behind it.
Of course not every single line was nice and thin, but I decided it's OK. Sometimes manually weaved fabrics have thicker threads as well.

To keep colour nicely red I did some red lines on the bright areas too. It helped to create even more contrast between threads. Then I used the same red to create light threads in the shadows. And finally some Leviathan Purple (GW wash) to create dark threads there as well. After a while I added few beige lines in the shadows at the back of the cloth, in the shadows. And when threads were more or less done, I applied a layer or two of red ink (Deep red W&N). Few more touch ups and little corrections and the cloth was ready.
I think that using wash instead of ink would also do the trick, but probably I'd need few more layers (as inks have more pigment than washes, while still being transparent).

Blue mantle:

For this piece I was planning to do mantle full of mystical symbols and signs.... but I was too affraid that I'll spoil the whole paintjob, so decided to do something simpler. 
The technique used here is pretty much the same as with red cloth on Grinder, first smooth blending, then thin and faint white lines, then some turquoise glazes, turquoise lines and some more glazes. I decided not to introduce really dark lines here, because the whole mantle should stay rather light in colour, ethereal. Also I tried to do the lines thinner than on the Grinder, mostly because the mini is much smaller, and I didn't want the fabric to look fake or extremely thick.

Colours I used to paint the mantle:
- VMC  off-white (70820)
- VMC blue green (70808)
- VMC medium blue (70963)
- VMC black (70950)


At the photos below you can see few steps of the process:

The noticable differences in the hue of the cloak are mostly my experiments with painting, and only a little inconsitency with lighting.