Chest of Colors forum

arctica wrote:generally i highlight with white and shade with a darker shade of the colour or black. So i think if i can start introducing different colours to my work i can really bring out a higher quality model.

well, you can start using off-whites for highlighting. I like ivory color for this purpose, GW bleached bone is excellent too. They don't make your models look 'bleached' and don't desaturate highlights that much.

alternatively you can experiment with highlighting cold colors with warm ones (eg. blues with ivory) and vice versa (eg. oranges with cold bluish off-whites). effects can be surprising.

and instead of shading with black, use darker shade of the base color, and then in the latest stages - dark shade of the complementary color. this will reduce saturation in the darkest parts which looks natural (shadow -> little light -> nothing to bring out colors) and more interesting than using black.

I like to see purple used in shadows because it's very natural. Purple is complementary to sunlight (yellow) and so in real shadows caused by sunlight you can often see a hint of purple.

Interesting, thanks for that Mahon. I have started introducing bleached bone into my highlights more then white now actually, especially when i paint red. I was thinking about putting something together for Salute 9 this month and so it might be a good opportunity to push this new information into my model and really make it shine.

I think purple is one of those colours i'd never associate with shades but its very true what you say when you study real life more. I want to play around with warmer and colder shades on my minis too, to give them more atmosphere, the tsons and all this army painting was more to help me refine my blending and improve my placement of lighting in NMM (and contrast ) but they have always been nice and bright, so now i can give my models more depth now i think.

When you check THIS PHOTO you will see the snow is slightly orange-colored by the sunlight. So it's weak but warm light.

Complementary color to orange is ... blue.
That's why the shadow looks a bit blue.

Well as another update looks like i really am losing my concentration and patience for painting these, so i decided just to get these out the way. Although, saying that i do still have three more to go lol. But anyway for table top quality i think they are alright. Here is the piccy. I can definately say not my best work but i think i'll be really glad when these last 4 models are all painted. Think next thing on the agenda are another 3 obliterators.

Click to see full-sized image

May not be anything fancy comparatively, but they still look good to me. If anything I would've made the mutations a little more varied in color or fleshy, but I don't think it's really a big deal considering.

I think I'd die after painting so much tsons ^^

yeah, not the same standard you got us used to, but pretty nice anyway

Table top, I think it's slightly above that level. None the less that army will look awesome on the gaming table and I'm sure people will be quite jealous of it!

They look great brother but yeah, they are a tad down in quality from the previous ones. Time to take a break maybe, paint something else for a bit. It is what I had to do for my Tsons as well, just got so sick of painting metallic blue that I had to do something else (hence my WoC army). Of course, it probably didn't help that my Tsons were actually finished at one time and I stripped them all to repaint them....

I think the Thousand Sons are gonna look good and shiny on the table. I would thoroughly enjoy playing that army (win lose or draw) if even one of my regular opponents played with the minis to that level. Great free hand on the lord by the way.