Monday, April 20, 2009

Eldar Avatar

I just started work on a new project, my Avatar. I realized that I owed it to myself to post, as the painting is getting sort of complicated.. And it would be a good idea to have a log of what I was doing for future reference.

First, some images:

From Eldar


From Eldar


From Eldar


The painting details.

- Prime black, with a Mechrite Red basecoat.

- Cracks start as Blazing Orange and work through fiery orange, Sunburst Yellow, Bad Moon Yellow, and then really hot zones get white mixed with yellow ink. The mix should be mostly white, but should have very noticeable tones of yellow. Too white ends up looking blue.

- Armor plates will start as Mechrite Red, with the edges highlighted with blazing orange (during the initial crack painting. Over this is a mix of Mechrite Red and Chaos Black. The mix should overshoot into the red compared to the end product. Badab Black wash is then applied to the plate. The edges are progressively layered and highlighted with Scab Red, Blood Red, then Blazing Orange again, and then the entire plate is covered (again!) with Badab Black.

You can see why I wanted to detail this. The armor cracks are largely just a progressive highlight, but it took some work to figure out a good coloration of the armor plate that would look hot, but be mostly black.

My opinion on the end result is that the armor plate is damned near exactly what I wanted (I'd prefer a blending approach instead of a layering approach, but I'm human,) but the cracks need to be better integrated. The white needs some colors on top, and the cracks that run into the white are too abrupt.

More updates to come later!