OSL Fire Prism - Update 4

I'd say that I'm about 85% done--with all of the crystal glow effects complete. The remaining painting includes the entire undercarriage and the base. Since the average view of the model will see only 10% of the undercarriage, I'm very reluctant to put a lot of work into it. I've seen some artists go nuts with glow effects from the bottom vents and so forth, but you'd never see this work unless you lifted and flipped the model. Therefore, I'm just going to concentrate on the engines and the back door. I plan to make the engines appear as though there is blue glow coming from within. On the back door, I intend to paint an Iyanden rune. The tank comes with a stock decal that fits perfectly, but I haven't decided whether I will apply and then paint over the decal or just go pure freehand.Below are two pictures of the tank so far.

Since Update 3; the engine intakes, the blue hull panels, and the nose weapon have been painted. The blue blending gave me a surprising amount of difficulty. After several hours of repainting I believe the problem I was having stemmed from the middle shade of blue paint. It seemed to have a higher-than-average pigment density that made it difficult to create a gradient as I dragged the brush. The dark blue I was using worked much better, so I did the whole blue blend dragging this darker shade over the medium blue in a hundred successive, very thin layers.

OSL Fire Prism - Update 3

The hull is coming along quite well. Below is a pair of images showing the progress so far. The blue panels still need to be blended and hard lined and the gems on the front of the hull need to be painted green. The lower hull (the black part) is still untouched. Nevertheless, enough is done to show how the OSL is coming along. I am satisfied with the way the yellow green came out on the tan and how the reflection of the crystal came out on the canopy. To accentuate the brightness from the crystal, I painted the opposite side of the hull in a couple shades darker tan...which I think worked out well too.

Looking at these pics, I see some lines that need to be cleaned up and the like. Since you don't normally get to see Golden Demon pics at this close range, I wonder how clean their lines really are.
Next up; I finish the blue panels and then on to the bottom hull. I look forward painting the refection of the crystal on the engine intake grid as well as making the exhaust nozzles glow.

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.