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| Cold Ones on a warm day. |
Firstly: I've been using a medium layer brush from Games Workshop, one of their new sets. It holds water quite well, but has to be kept damp at all times - if it dries out even a little, bristles start sticking out. That's not to say it's a bad brush - certainly I'm much more impressed than their previous offerings - just that you have to be a little more careful if you want them kept in good shape.
As for being a layer brush, holding a decent amount of water helps considerably. I've been very exact when painting (good for detail, bad for speed and batch painting) and the brush either holds a large amount of paint when required, or is also good at painting directly from pot to model - no mixing down the palette (not recommended for large amounts of paint, but rather for just a small dab on the tip which is then spread around a on a small area on the model).
I'll see how the brush continues to hold up, but I think it'll be ok. Not as good a high quality, professional set (it doesn't beat the good Army Painter ones), but better than what you'd get from a generic painting hobby store.
Another note is on colour theory. I sort of realised this when playing around with the scales on the Cold Ones, then realised it's what was being done on several display Orc models. Green should definitely use blues and purples for shading, and some yellow for highlights (more on that in a moment). Colour wheels are useful. Don't just make it darker of the same colour, but rather use a colour wheel to find shades darker and lighter to help. It really does make a difference, particularly with muscle, or anything organic in shape and texture. I think this comes down to subsurface scattering - skin is translucent, and there are different light absorption, reflection, and refraction depending on how deep the light can penetrate: what lies underneath the skin, how taught muscles are, etc. Armour plating is obviously different, and I suspect I'll stick to different shades of the same colour for armour, but move towards harmonious colours with anything organic.
To be clear: I'm not doing this much with the Cold Ones. I might with their riders, when I get to them.
Lastly for this post, glazes. I've been having trouble figuring out how to use them properly, and so experimented a little with different Cold Ones. This ties back into colour theory, and it finally clicked how I'd like to be using them. Sure, they can give a tint to metallics, but I'm finding them quite effective at making highlights stand out more. Using Lamenter's Yellow glaze over green muscle higlighting really made them "pop". It's really that simple: to make a green highlight stand out that little more, use a yellow glaze. To draw it back, use blue. The picture above doesn't show it too well, but the muzzle on the left Cold One was given a glaze, and it really does brighten things up without disrupting any blending working. On the right, a Bloodletter glaze was used to make things a little less brown.
I guess I just need to think of glazes as a kind of anti-shade paint (used in the opposite manner to the shades).
I've also used glazes of red on the some of dermal plates (on the green-based Cold Ones), with the idea that blood can be flushed through to help cool down the creature, or perhaps it darkens with age (a couple of others have a more blue-grey colouring to the plates).
The scales have some drybrushing work on a few models too. Just a bit of whatever colour (Tyrant Skull mostly) to give the raised areas of the scales a bit of a wear and weathering.
-- silly painter.
