The Kabal of the Golden Rose

[Apaintingchaos]

I finally picked up the (air)brush and started painting my Dark Eldar army, starting with a couples of guinea pigs models to test out the color scheme I designed around this three key points:

• the under armour / Wytch suit must be dark, possibly a gradient from black to another colour; it must not be a single solid colour
• the armour must be of a golden colour
• I wanted to use purple somewhere, because I like purple

After may days spent experimenting and reading about color theory and the like I decided to go with the following color combination:

• the under armour / Wytch suit will be painting in green blended over black
• the main armour color will be a reddish gold highligthed up to a yellow/white gold to create a color contrast with the green and ...
• ... the purple of the cloath areas and other details

I assembled two Wyches and one Incubus and primed them with Vallejo German Panzer Grey primer, then I airbrushed the main green color on the suit





Then I moved to the armour, and I painted it using Red Gold, Old Gold and White Gold from the Vallejo Liquid Gold paint range





Finally, yesterday I worked on the cloath areas on the Incubus using a combination of black, Liche Purple, Warlock Purple, Bonewhite and Dechala Lilac



Tonight I'll move to the helm and main chest plates: the plan is to paint them white, wish me luck

If you are interested, I've posted a more detailed step-by-step on my blog here and here


C&C very welcome!

[Apaintingchaos]

A little update on the Incubus that I also used to test out my new photo setup since the last pics I posted where not that great I think ...





Since I posted about my Dark Eldar color scheme around the Internet I got many questions about the paints I used for the golden armour so I blogged about them here

[Yuggoth]

That looks splendid, I dig your use of tmm on dark eldar.
Personally I think your gold needs way more contrast. Have you thought about darklining to separate the armor plates? Also, you could use small amounts of purple in the shades, that gives a nice old gold. Another good colour for shading gold is VGC skinshade ink (not sure about the name, it is rubbed off on my bottle). Its a very warm brown that pushes tones into a more bronze direction.

[Apaintingchaos]

Thank you!
You are absolutely right on the need of contrast as I have not worked in that direction yet: there is no shading on the model right now, except on the purple cloth


I'm testing out some oil washes for that purpose, a reddish/umbral one for the base shadows and a dark violet one for the depper shadows


Last night I completed work on the helm and the back blades so I should be able to work on shading it tonight


Than I'll move on the Klaive and for that I must figure out how to do that nmm / glass effect that I love so much lol

[Yuggoth]

Oh sorry. I missunderstood you, I thought that you considered the gold already finished. Silly me :-D
Looking forward to your next update.

glass effect? Do you mean that effekt where you have fading from light tones to dark ones running in opposite directions on two faccets of a blade, usually complementet by stark edge highlights?
Don´t know how to phrase it better in English, but if it is what I think it is, its doing to fit the model spot on. :-) May I suggest basing it on the greenish / teal colour you used for the softer armour parts? Might look a bit like jade then.

[Apaintingchaos]

yeah that's the effect! something like what was done on this stunning model I found here:


http://translate.googleusercontent.c...BxhfqDB0Rn1LXA




but with greens like in this mockup I made in photoshop:



I'm actually using Jade Green (from Vallejo) in my green recipe so I think it would work great too! I just don't really known how to do this correctly with a brush.
maybe I could do it with the airbrush, I should try it

[Yuggoth]

I would guess that airbrushing would require a hell lot of masking. For me at least it would be easier to do it with a brush. Just use very fine layering or wetblending.

[Apaintingchaos]

I spent the last few days tring out a color scheme for the klaive (the big glaive like weapon used by the Incubi) and this if what I came up in the end (tested on plain paper):



The dark / light points of each sections are a bit too far away from each other but this piece of paper if way more bigger than a real klaive so on the real bit this would not be a problem