This guide provides an in-depth understanding of color theory, specifically in miniature painting, and how to create color schemes for miniatures and model kits. It covers the basics of color theory, such as finding a color scheme, using complementary and analogous colors, and blending colors using the color wheel and primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. The guide also discusses the importance of color harmony in creating appealing miniatures, and how to borrow color schemes from other sources such as sports teams, games, animals, and movies.
Color theory offers guidelines for choosing colors that will achieve specific goals, but color is still a matter of taste. Working with a limited color palette can simplify color and make artwork look more sophisticated and modern. A good starting point for constructing a palette is to look at a color wheel and check complementary colors.
To begin painting, create a new Solid Color layer in Photoshop, select a vibrant color, and set the blending mode to overlay. Lower the opacity a bit to create a more realistic effect. By following this guide, you can create a more appealing and sophisticated miniature painting experience.
📹 A Practical Technique to Pick a Color Scheme for Your Warhammer Army!
This is my favorite way to pick a paint scheme. It’s fun and it helps me get great colors for my models. This strategy emphasizes …
📹 5 Tips to Choose Color Schemes – HC 371
In this Hobby Cheating tutorial, I take you through how to choose your color schemes for your new army. Whether fantasy, sci-fi or …
Hi Brent, i just wanted to say thank you. I’ve stumbled upon your website a moth or so ago. It was a hard time for me emotionally and your articles were comforting and reminded me that i can try to get back to this hobby (i’ve paintet some minis before but then a lot of life happened). I’ve had a board game “blood rage” lying at home so i’ve bought some vallejo paints and started painting. And i’ve been addictevly painting for the last month. I’ve never realised how much i’ve missed this hooby. And i’m happy to say that my mental health got better as i used these painting sessions as sort of meditation to clear my head and thoughts. Thank you again for reminding me how much i’ve missed this hobby at the right time when i needed it.
There’s a siege-cat on the field… we’re all doomed! This is great. I actually turned up a small case of old minis at the weekend that could do with this sort of treatment. I’ve always been more of a painter than a gamer (though I’m by no means a great painter; I’m competent, and good enough to impress my D&D players, but my eyes have been getting worse as I’ve got older and I also have a bit of a tremor problem in my hands) but I was chuffed to find this little box of random old guys from years ago. I’m building a dedicated area for painting, and I’m going to start collecting again, so this colour scheme audition process seems like it’s the way to go! Thanks!
I know this might sound a bit off, but I love that you mention some things in this article that are often overlooked in other painting websites/videos. Painting paralysis and more importantly fun. Thank you for reminding people the hobby is supposed to be fun and often it is our own fears hesitance apprehension, etc. that prevents us from just getting in there and having fun. Happy New Year!
This was so fun and relaxing to watch. Nothing too close to pay attention to, just the sound of your voice and your wonderful philosophy. I can’t wait to see what you chose in the next article! Personally I like the teal or the olive green with the yellow/brown undertone. Very foresty. Teal’s just a favorite color of mine, even if it can be a bit garish.
I am as happy as a child on Christmas whenever you post a new article Brent 🙂 I really liked the darker orange Warrior on the far left side of the screen. Can you recommend a good orange color in that tone? I have Vallejos Extra Opaque Heavy Orange but that is much closer to a Caucasian flesh tone than it is to a highly saturated orange. I have ordered Vallejo Game Color Hot Orange, too but it has not arrived yet… Looking forward to that army painting article! Cheers from Germany 🙂
This is some good advice, although, I have spent the last month preparing and priming and hyping myself up for painting my new blood angels (sanguariny guard and mephiston) that I did not want to spend more time stripping the old janky models that my dad just bought from a friend. I will just have to hope it goes well, because I feel it will be worse if I spend the next month of my free time to paint stuff I don’t want to and will never use.
One other tip for nailing down your scheme is once you’ve picked all the colors, is to take 5 or 10 test models and do a production run on them. Paint them as a squad, the way you would your actual army. Take notes/pictures during the process. That way you have the exact method noted down step by step, for later reference. I’ve come back to armies after 5+ years, and been able to match new units exactly.
Cat-in-a-Snapple-box 😀 😀 😀 The minis in the Stripping Bath looked really Chaotic. “I’m having a joyous time here…”, while the article looks like a scene from “Jacob’s Ladder”. I’m guessing that the army will be in the rich orange colour with the dark transition towards the bottom of the shield. That’s the really stand out paint job for me.
I contacted a couple of traders on eBay to see if they had any broken, incomplete, badly painted models. One came back to me and sold me a big box of damaged/incomplete models for a few pounds. He even asked me what techniques I was learning and army I was using. Then sent me a selection that he thought would be suitable.
Well, I got that Slaves to Darkness Start Collecting set for myself for Xmas. The ones already assembled are staring at me, daring me to pick a scheme and start painting. And my favourite Youtube mini painter anounces he is going to do a article on painting them… Sometimes you just feel all is correct in the Universe… 🙂 . Happy Holidays to you, Brent, and all you people out there 😉 .
Another good method of testing paint schemes are to go buy a bin of army men. You get a couple hundred for ~10-15 dollars. Then you can experiment with different techniques, color schemes, base coats, washes, etc… without having to worry about ruining more expensive models. Also a good starting point to getting kids into miniature painting.
Brent, I somehow stumbled across your website a good while ago, even though I hadn’t been into the hobby for nearly 20 years. Then a chance encounter with a GW boardgame, alongside your enthusiasm for the hobby, got me back into modelling. Your philosophy on model painting has been a great inspiration. I like to think about the story of the models, and I love moving away from the GW lore and box art to create my own. Thanks for the inspiration and teaching us all something about mindfulness.
Hi, Brent! Thank you for sharing your knowledge and love your content. You’ve inspired me to pick up painting minis again. I felt I had ruined my beginning to an army and gave up out of frustration. After using some of your tips and painting a friend’s 3D print, I’ve decided to give it another go. Do you have any suggestions for filling a tyrannofex? I misglued part of the skull and abdomen pieces leaving odd looking crevices.
Thanks for this article and your infectious positive enthusiasm! I picked up my own army of Grots and a starter set of paint and just finished my first model yesterday and began work on five more right after. Really having a blast, just having fun painting them – not worrying if they’re going to turn out perfect.
Happy holidays, Brent! Looking forward to seeing more of you in the new year. So good to see something about colour and experimentation. I always second-guess myself when it comes to colour and I often end up going back and changing them to how they “should” look….As though pirates and elves “should” look any particular way…
Sometimes when I don’t have an idea for what my miniature’s color scheme will be, I contact my friends who are also into the hobby. Then we give each other various challenges on different color schemes. Be it god specific (for Chaos) or something made up. It can be fun and gives you some motivation to finish a challenge
Why not make them a ragtag group, mix in couple competently colours. They are a raiding choas war ban grabbing what ever they can from spoils of war after all. Plus it would make your army look unique. Maybe with your leaders put some the colours on him a shield from this campaign, a cloack from here. Ect.
Uniformity? in my chaos army? perish the thought! I kid, but what i’m doing is painting each warrior a little differently and then have them all on lava bases with some OSL from the bases as the common factor with all of them. this way I can have unique chaos warriors that still look like they are part of the same group.
Whoa what a coincidence. I just grabbed up a copy of the old Chaos Warriors Start Collecting since I wanted to paint something inspired by Adrian Smith’s old art. Gotta love these iconic models. You’re one hundred percent right about avoiding the feeling of swimming upstream. The hobby should feel like a chore or slog as little as possible. Is there a Goobertown/Dana Howl collab in our future? As always thanks for the article! Edit: I almost forgot to ask, is The Green Marauder going to make an appearance in this army? Maybe that’s a bit spoilery for the next article but I’m curious.
The funny thing is, I am going through the same thing with my own AOS STD army. I could not decide on a single color scheme, so I decided to have all the warriors and non-aligned units to have wild, various color schemes. To fluff it out as warriors and troops from various different warbands all coming together. It may look like color vomit by the end, but it will be my own, special color vomit.
I just recently got in to 40K and I had a BUNCH of leftover WH Fantasy minis and I did much the same thing since my past experiences with trying to paint minis resulted in thick coats that destroyed details. I had an idea and I tested out several schemes and paints on these leftover models before settling on a scheme and going to paint my main army.
That was my struggle when I first started into warhammer minis.. I mean you need enough models to actually pratice yet you feel a bit stupid to spend 300$ on minis when you aint even sure if you can make something nice with them (I dont have your skills haha).. At some points I went like screw this and went with something I WANTED them to look like.. Ended up with a pretty damn clean Soul drinkers (Purples, Black,Bronze,Gold) themed Space marines as I simply felt like I nailed this color scheme (Very proud of how my purple turned out) Had 3 test subject before chosing the pattern.. they were all attempts at generics space marines chapters but I prefer my unique ones as I seem to be better at doing them ”my way” than trying to copy the box or a specific image*video (Kinda harsh for a noob when you try to paints at the level of a youtuber and notice you just… aint there yet haha)
Already asked this on one of your earlier articles, but here I go again 😉 What is your experience with superglue when stripping minis? Also, what about mixed minis(plastic+metal+resin)? I’ve been thinking about stripping some old, and heavily converted minis. And I’m a little afraid to, since I have no idea if they’ll fall apart. I have both LA’s and Super Clean, since they look like they did the best job.
I painted some of these not long back I experimented with an Idea i had I wanted the armour to look like the red of Iron-man’s Armour. took me ages ( and I mean ages!) to get the paint job right then I did all of them exactly like that. The customer loved them ( much to my relief as he never really gave me any ideas or options he just wanted them painted) but I learned a new technique whilst doing a job with no guidance I loved it and the outcome
Greetings from a fellow chemist! I was actually in dyes for a while before transitioning to a different career. Anyway, I’m looking into an airbrush, but I’m wondering how loud they are? Is this something that I can do in the living room (with appropriate covering on the table), or would I need to do this in another room?
When I get new models I spend the first few days mulling over paint schemes, and trying paint combinations on the stencils the models come in, to get an idea of what the paint combinations look like. Once I find something I like, I make a start, then change my mind as often as I like. It is my army after all, and I can do whatever I like with it.
I was introduced to figures a year ago, and I was able to see your articles. I’m practicing and learning as a textbook. I’d like to know what’s in the tank in this article. I put it in alcohol 24 hours a day, and it takes time to fix it. It’s taking too long. It’s uncomfortable. The article quality is very good and informative, so I’m perusal it steadily. I am Korean. I’m not good at English, so I’m using a translator. I’m sorry I couldn’t thank you enough, but I’ll always support you. Thank you so much.^^!
It’s super funny that you are talking about color schemes. Cause a few days back I decided to start being conscious about my color choices with my fantasy minatures. I have watched several articles on color schemes now and how to pick the right colors to compliment other choices I make. I am jazzed. Thanks for a cool article again looking forward to another 24hour challenge again, should be great!!!!
Bro, what’s up how you doing? I commented about a month ago that I wanted to get into painting miniatures but I wasn’t sure if it was for me because I’m shakey as fuck. You gave me some advice on how to keep my hands steady so sure enough, I bought a chaos warrior set and some paint. (non citadel paint tho) I tried to use realistic armor and cloak colors and I’m pretty proud of the way it turned out, I’m painting everything by hand atm but I’m thinking of buying an airbrush, will I lose the ability to do “realistic” armor colors then? Or will I be able to spray small parts as well? Great to see chaos minis in this article as well! Turns out we have a miniature and boardgames shop in my city, really helpful owner there, showed me his own collection and really took his time to share some tips with me. I’m not getting in war gaming tho, but Im thinking about making a diorama (there are alot of “how to” articles on YouTube) But allright I’m getting off topic, once again thank you very much for that extra little push in the right direction to get me started. Never thought I would like this as much as I do now! Greetings from amsterdam
It’s a chaos army…. it is super weird that a faction called “chaos” would have perfectly identically colored uniforms or even color scheme across its army anyway. If it were truly chaos, wouldn’t you expect that every person in the army would have their own wildly mixed up combination disjointed armor pieces? Who exactly in the chaos army is in charge of making paint and spray painting everyone’s armor from the same batch of paint?
Maybe you could give me a hand. I am painting my first space marines and I am very excited. But when I ordered them I remember I still don’t have a color scheme picked out. I wanted to do Legion of the Damned because they have my favorite color scheme, however I wanted to do something more personal and GW is no longer selling the Legion of the Damned kits. But I really like the flame decals and the skulls from LotD and I wanted to incorporate that into my color scheme. I was thinking of a dark red base with the flames and skulls and whatnot instead of the black like LotD. So it would still be different yet have the things I liked. Maybe you could help me get some ideas. Thank you love the article btw!
actually this article helped me for my chaos-warriors – I already knew what colour I want to use but I could not decide on the cloak. besides I use a slight different ways to try-and-error (also as I don’t have an airbrush and painting all these would take way to long for me…) so I first tried out some ideas on photoshop (I alreay knew in what direction of colour I wanted to go) -after that I tried the best on acutal models. Also I didn’t use actual chaos warriors but some space marines I had laying around – close enough for chaos-warriors for me 😉
You are really the messenger of pure enjoyment and zen at painting miniatures, catching the most positive essence of the hobby. You are one of the main influences for getting into the hobby, and i am greatful for it! I will use a similiar process to determine a costum forgeworld scheme for my skitarii start collecting. Thank you!
I recently discovered your website and love it. I dont paint minis, and have not played dice and paper games in a couple of decades (I don’t have any friends who play anymore. They stopped and finding new people in this day and age is…questionable. Lots of problems meeting like-minded people. Especially thru the Internet). But, I do build models. Primarily sci-fi, and have a few of my recent builds on my website. perusal you build and paint is very enjoyable. And listening to your insight into building and painting, as well as your latest input during these most difficult and tragic times this 2020, feels lovely knowing that another artist shares the same ideas as I. While perusal this article, I had an idea for a paint scheme, or possible challenge, for you. Something simple I’m sure, and perhaps silly to most figure painters. But you seem to be someone who might actually do it. What if you painted your figures like American cars of the 1950s and early 60s. Seafoam Green, with White accents, and chrome trim like the classic Ford Thunderbird. Candy Apple Red, and White like the ’65 Corvette. And other multicolored paint jobs from classic cars. I don’t build car models, or paint figures (I used to do both, but it has been an incredibly long time). But I build and kitbash science fiction spaceships. Someday I may do that Seafoam Green, White, and Chrome on a starship Enterprise. But I have so many projects going on right now. But I think it would look neat on some of these minis.
A good article. My only comment is stripping paint is not so awesomely easy, no matter what product you use. People should know it takes plenty of work, and a lot of time. More importantly, most models aren’t worth stripping over just buying new models for cheap. Especially when it comes to GW plastics. I think stripping should be reserved for unique models you really have a hard time getting your hands on.
There’s one thing that’s still missing—the voice in my head is still different from yours. Perhaps I need some recordings of you saying things like “oh, that’s interesting,” “let’s put that aside for now and see if it can be used for something later” and “perhaps it’s time to prime over it again. You can paint and strip your models as many times as you want!” so that when… certain things… happen… I can just press a button for the injection of some calm. Always love your work.
17.5 minutes of him saying “Use test models. Try different colors. Use test models. Try different colors. Use test models…” Some people said he’s got a very relaxing demeanor and is like the Bob Ross of miniatures with his soothing voice and positivity; I agree. but I was hoping for more practical information; like “these colors match will with these colors. Layer your colors like this. This type of paint behaves like this when it is applied.” He was also using an airbrush, which I don’t have, so this article is not only 1) not useful to people just starting the hobby but he 1) did not explain techniques on how to use an air brush (like Adam Savage from Tested). TL;DR: Soothing article. Bare/absent practical advice.
Nope, too much waste- waste of time, waste of resources. Might be good for you, but not for me. Metal is metal, cloth is cloth, wood is wood, leather is leather. Only certain things make dyes and paints. Different regions have different dyes and paints. If you carry the imagination to extremes, you can make extreme color combinations, but they won’t look like they truly exist.
I’ve struggled with choosing color schemes for years, like REALLY struggled. I was recently diagnosed with ADHD at age 30 after having powered through it (with no small effort) for decades, and my suspicion is that this has played a major role in the type of obsessive indecisiveness that has delayed very many projects in the hobby for me. I imagine that others may be able to relate to this as well. One thing I would recommend to anyone who feels like they have a similar issue is to take a step back from printed and published resources and try to remember what you found really appealing at your first glance. In other words, try to remember what the models or army looked like that sparked your interest in them in the first place. Then use THAT scheme to paint a few chaff/troop/battleline models. At which point you can revisit your sources of inspiration and decide if there is anything you’d like to modify, and if there is, pick 1-2 elements you want to add or subtract and paint another batch of models. It is very important that you do not let yourself obsess and “research” a bunch of stuff while you are in the process of finishing as batch of models, as this is ultimately what paralyzes you and keeps you from making actual progress. You want to avoid overstimulating yourself with too many ideas in a period of time where you need to stick to one or two ideas. As you complete more and more of your models, you will feel more invested and confident in your choice and be less prone to what I’d call “progress paralysis.
For a great many of mini/army painters their background isn’t from anything creative, let alone using paint. So it can be daunting to come up with color themes without much experience. A good shortcut is look at things for inspiration. Maybe you like a certain car in a certain colorway and can apply that motif to your marines. Maybe some warcraft armor from a decade ago is your jam, paint that. Inspiration can come from anywhere, it doesnt have to be from your codex. When I do army painting I alter 1 part of the color pallet, or color layout, to make them my own and in some cases to make it more efficient to paint.
6. Maintain hue contrast: complementary colors look better than adjacent. 7. Saturation and brightness contrast is just as important: 3 equally saturated and bright colors look cheap unless you’re painting a clown. make one dark for unimportant secondary stuff and the other desaturated for highlighting focal points. 8. Analogous colors work best in gradients: e.g. an orange panel next to a red panel looks bad, whereas red-orange panel is ok. 9. Less is more: when adding more colors to the scheme, it’s getting harder to ensure they don’t conflict with each other. 10. If you really want to have a multitude of colors think about space “contrast”: a. don’t place similar colors near each other; b. give colors different amount of model’s surface. 11. In my experience the best combination is 1-2 complementary colors plus one outstanding that doesn’t take a lot of space and goes in gradient from highly saturated to white.
The paint mock up is brilliant, gonna use that for sure! I really lucked into my schemes fitting ok on color trinaries, with the only disparity being stuff like “made it brighter to work as a plasma/energy color”. I will have to put the rest of these in use, thank you for the amazing article as always!
Great article Vince! Feel like this is a massive topic that doesn’t get spoken about enough and these are some great tips. 🙂 One thing I also find often a problem is when I find too many cool schemes for an army and I can’t decide on one. I’ve done this many times with my Nighthaunt over the years and have so many models in my collection from different ideas and in different schemes it can be really hard to just lean into one.
There are great open source alternatives to things like Photoshop, Krita for example. Just in case you might want to see if a big scary program will help you, don’t worry though, they’re not so scary really. They do have some significant advantages though: Layers, different ways to combine the colour information on those layers ( a big one here is using a layer set to multiply or screen on top of an image of a grey model, as this is kind of like actually painting on the model), better selection tools like lasso, polygonal lasso or the magic wand (using those you could also do fast mockups of kitbashes up front)
Picking a good scheme can be challenging especially for people like me who want most new army projects to have a general theme and their own color scheme. I do find the look at existing schemes for inspiration as a great tool. Sometimes you’ll just have an idea hit you which you then expand on and finalize. I do this all before I even decide to buy a single mini. If i can’t think of a good theme to go with i often will not bother starting that army. themes can be pretty basic as well. Oh all the armies i play have no X. What armies excels at X thing and go off that.
Another thing I do personally that helps me is figuring out the personality of what I want to paint. It helps hone in on the scheme I want. For instance I love Iron Warriors but I wanted to make a custom warband. I wanted them to be Slaanesh worshippers but their worship came in the form of excessive greed of others riches and technology. So I made the trim dark silver but their armor is a gold with purple in their loincloths, eye lenses, etc.
Thanks! Very helpful. I’m trying to come up with color scheme for my Soulblight Gravelord. I was lucky and tracked Battleforce with them. I’m thinking about practicing airbrush technique on them. So I don’t want to think about about color scheme to much and instead build up my airbrush skill. But I don’t like official color scheme. So I think I take official color scheme and tweak one color slightly and that would work great for me. Thanks for suggestion!
I am going thru your beginner stuff playlist and am quite happy (as a 62 year old beginner). I needed a logical approach. As I do Photoshop and illustrator stuff for a living I always have a command-z option, yet painting and building up figures hadn’t made sense. Ninjon and Maniac turned me onto your website. If you are in Minnesota, I would love to buy you a beer. Enjoy your week – Joe
One thing about painting my Tau gungnam crisis suit army that tortured me was that I wanted to paint my Tau to look like MINE. So I “had” to use “my awesome” color scheme. But I didn’t like any color scheme I made better that the regular Tau or Viorla Septs GW already made. So for MONTHS I didn’t touch the tau I wanted to paint. Now I’m happy I just picked one of those GW color schemes and my army looks awesome.
I feel like the one thing missing from this is how to choose non primary colors. For example an obliterator has a ton of stuff on it that wouldn’t necessarily match your primary color scheme. Really anything with a ton of cabling or flesh or whatever. Sometimes stuff like gun holsters is pretty easy because you can just go with a leather color and it tends to match up pretty well with just about any color scheme. Other things that you don’t want to look leathery and so you have to find something that matches but it’s not going to be your primary three colors (usually). That’s been one of my problems anyways.
Doing the digital mock up is a great idea. Lyla Mev goes over doing stuff like that too in some of her articles, but she usually uses a much fancier (and kind of intimidating) program to do it. Using a transparent brush on like MS Paint is great idea, and much more accessible. Also, seeing how you use pop colors to such a subtle affect is really helpful. Thanks for another great article!
Really nice summary of what I wish I’d known when I sat down to paint my first army a long time ago. Question: how do you go about thinking about colour schemes when most of the real estate on the model is neutral (e.g. black armour; brown robes)? I usually end up tinting browns toward red or orange, or tinting the highlights on the black toward blue, but sometimes you just want a neutral black or white.
Mine were pretty simple. When I first started I played the World Eaters. Then the Grey Knights. Then in 7th when the Khorne Daemon Kin codex came out I played The Wrath. When I started up a Sisters army I used my GM’s DnD setting for inspiration since it was originally supposed to take play in the 40K universe. I used my PC’s color scheme at the time to paint my Sisters. Since the World Eaters codex came out in 9th and I lost access to like 75% of my armor, I have been updating them to my current CSM army: The Black Knights. They are a terminator heavy warband that wear Frog Helmets (from the Grey Knight Terminators kit) for easy kitbashes. Though they look like Black Legion. Black and bronze or gold depending on the placement in the FOC. So mine were kind og chosen for me, save for the Sisters and the Black Knights. My Sisyers one is overly complicated, but it looks good.
Also Tip 2 can be used backwards, ANY COMBINATION OF COLORS YOU MIGHT LIKE has been painted on a space marine! My last scheme started with me googling “orange and white spacemarine” realizing it looked good, stealing fauxhammer’s scheme and thats how i painted all my Storm Legion for warmachine… Literally stole their shit, not even sorry about it!
13:16 well… Stripping a freshly painted model is very easy and very fast. If you have a bath of your favorite degreaser ready to go, just do it. Might not do much, but if it makes you feel good, why not. On the other hand, if you never stripped a model before, go with what Vince suggest and paint over it. My point: there are no absolutes.
Hi Vince. Really like the idea of a digital mock up. Going to order myself a colourwheel. Strangely although the digital mock up is a great idea I also love the feel of something physical in my hands (!) I suppose this need would also be fulfilled by the physical test figure. It’s also nice to have my free form attitude to schemes validated by a pro painter such as yourself. I don’t play TT and I’m not entering Golden Demon – I model/paint for pleasure and relaxation so not painting my minis (or indeed my models) according to canon is the norm. One more thing – yaaay Larry! 😁
Ι cant stand the dark angels been shown with green shoulder pads and red bolters. I want to puke at the red bolters. So I changed these, the shoulder pads of the command staff and veterans I paint gold, and rank and file silver. For the bolters I switched it to a very light white. As you said those pictures are suggestions and by no means a set in stone scheme.
One point I would add are: Think about the Base beforehand. I painted Custom Black Templars where i used Blue as my secondary color for cloth and other parts that are usually red. Now that can work, but the bases are also dark and ice themed. While bases that look similar to the mini can work usually having a distinct color scheme for the base makes the Mini pop more. On a different note: how do you use a color wheel when 2 of your main colors are black and white? I always had issues, adding different colors (even 2 more) to my Black Templars without it looking to crowded.
as a beginner: copy existing schemes to learn the basics. as an intermediate: try mixing schemes. learn new techniques. as a pro: teach others. keep learning. In all levels. Go with your gut. If it feels right, it will be right. Having said that: I currently sit on a Vyrkos Bloodborn and have no clue on how to paint him, other than box art
I’m in strong disagreement with your notion, that RGB or CYM doesn’t matter. You could say that it doesn’t matters a lot since both aren’t made for that use. If you go deeper into colortheory, you will find that they are colorspaces for techincal reproduction of color, and equally terrible for predicting perceptual variables. There was even a song made about it! “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, the impression is the result of neural activity in your brain, which is reasonably well decribed by transforming the spectral data into the retina primaries, then applying a power-law to accomodate for our visual systems gamma-correction, using another transformation matrix to create an opponent-color-space which is intended to be perceptually uniform with coordinates for Lightness and colorfulness-variables, often named a and b. That’s a colorspace!” Or perhaps I’m misremembering some of the lyrics…
Hey Vince how about color schemes where a metallic is the primary color I am having some trouble coming up with one that I like for a color scheme I feel should work (Steel with Orange pauldrons and purple as the remaining color but I cannot seem to make it work (in theory this color scheme should work but I am having a hard time of it)
Hi Vince lovely article, I was going to ask if you had any tips on how to start actually painting a scheme, but you answered that in your last point. I have been putting off painting my Stormcast, as I’m not sure how to pull off a matte black armour without it looking flat or grey – guess I’ll build myself a Larry the Stormcast and start testing! Also if you have any tips for frozen over armour for Stod, would love a article on that. <3
Hey Vince I’ve got a strange army colour scheme problem that is admittedly entirely self inflicted that I was hoping you might be able to give some advice on how to execute it. When I was doing my “looking for inspiration” step with the Lumineth, I ended up coming across an image of a Dawnrider painted in this amazing Rainbow colour scheme that I was so inspired by I ended getting my first box of Wardens as a result. The problem is, I don’t know how to realize this colour scheme on an army wide level. I have tons of cool ideas for the leaders and centerpieces (like having the cathallar have a dress that’s red at the neckline but goes through the rainbow until it’s purple at the bottom, or having the E&E twins each be half the rainbow, one warm one cold, or sticking a rainbow led in eltherion, or having the mountain cow be made of gemstones or bismuth instead of boring rock, or having the banner be an massively ornate pride flag) but I’m at a loss as to how to have that theme present on the smaller and more numberous battle line models. Like, the wardens for example, I’ve got the start of an idea (white armor, gold trim, rainbow plumes in their helmets) but then… How do I do their cloth skirts? The three ideas I’ve come up with are 1) have each member of the squad have a different primary cloth colour so that when they’re lined up they make a rainbow together. 2) is just have every battleline squad have a different cloth colour and achieve a rainbow that way (like, red squad, orange squad etc.