Back to Painting...

Well I finally got my painting table back up and running. Moving across the country and buying a new house can be taxing on a hobby... Like Teflon I have a hammerhead left over from Ard Boyz just waiting to see some paint. I plan to follow my standard blending pattern on this tank but add a few glowing effects to the engines, guns, and the various portals. In my mind this is the next logical step in my painting progression. The following shows my currnt progress on base coating.

As you can see this particular hammerhead is slated for a railgun as its primary weapon. I think I am going to go with blue as the accent color. From previous iterations I tend to like this the best and I think it will work best with the glowing effects I plan to add. More to come...

OSL Fire Prism-Update 2

I finished the turret tonight; after working on it for half of Saturday and all Sunday. I'm starting to wonder if I'll have time to work on any other models for the August Games Day. This has been a true learning experience and I have yet to get it right on the first try for any of the techniques I've tried. In fact, the final version of the turret will probably not be the same as you see below.

1. I'm still not sure I like the way the light from the crystal illuminates the tan. The online guides and the article in White Dwarf warn about the difficulty in getting OSL to work on a light colored objects and I definitely agree--illuminate black is easy and tan is hard. My first attempt tried painting the turret as though it was being illuminated by a bright white light and then I glazed over the areas with the lime green (scorpion green). This may have worked on a character model, but the inconsistency in paint application across a long brush stroke (along the armor panels) made it look like crap. I settled on a normal blend technique using combinations of lime green with bubonic brown, bleached bone, and then white.
2. To accentuate the reflections, I've chosen to paint the oval lumps as normal armor rather than gems (as in my original Fire Prism). Although I think I've done a good job at bringing them out with contrast, I'm not sure I like the lack of color the gems provided.
3. Speaking of the gems...in the last version I used green and purple gems. The use of tan, green, blue, and purple always seemed a little too much color. I've nixed the purple in the this version and this is why the canopy was painted with a blue-gray. This is also causing me to feel something is missing.

I'm not sure If I'll paint the main hull or the engines next. I plan of doing some blue OSL on the engines and I think I want to play with that for a while before I move back to the tan. I guess we'll find out next update. More to come....

OSL Fire Prism - Update 1

I've been slowly making progress on the tank. Below is a picture of the painting accomplished thus far. I started on the crystal and then experimented with the illumination of green light on the blue, black, and tan colors. This was not as straightforward as I thought. I initially tried to represent the green illumination on the blue with a turquoise color which looked pretty good at first. However, when I moved to the black parts, I went with a straight translation of the emerald and lime green color from the crystal onto the black and this clashed with the turquoise. Nevertheless, I found that a glaze of the lime green over the brightest parts of the turquoise looked good and will now use that for the rest of the tank.
Illuminating light colors is one of the areas where OSL can break down. You need to make sure that the illumination patches are always brighter than the base color of the part or it will not look believable. Therefore, illumination of the green light on the tan was represented with a very light tint (lots of white mixed in) of the lime green with white on the hardlines.
Next up is the main part of the turret; to include the canopy. I'm curious to see how accurately I can represent the reflection of the crystal in the glass.
More to come....

OSL Fire Prism

Golden Demon Entry One will be the OSL (Object Source Lighting) Fire Prism I've been imagining for two years. I'll be using the Fire Prism I assembled but never painted for last year's 'Ard Boyz tournament. My goal is to make it look like the turret crystal is glowing brightly and illuminating that side of the tank. I plan to use extreme contrast for this model but in the same color scheme as my other Fire Prism. Although my imagination is pretty good, I decided to simulate the actual illumination that might occur by using a small, batter powered light in the position of the crystal. Below are the pics that resulted from that experiment. The picture below that is my old Fire Prism (for reference).
More to follow...

Grots!

Finished painting some grots using new Raphael brushes, and trying to use more dramatic highlights.

I learned 3 things:
1 - I need to make MORE dramatic highlights, I didn't go far enough.
2 - Always keep a second CLEAN cup of water for clean ups.
3 - Never paint anything with the same water after painting metallics.