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This is my first real attempt at painting a power weapon. I looked up some videos on how to do it and This is what I got. How does it look? How can I improve.

Back of the sword.

What is your method for this. I'm not exactly good at power weapons either but I might have a few suggestions.

Base coat kantor blue. Painted everything excpet the bottom Alatoc blue. Painted tip hoeth blue. Edged in kantor blue. Then glazed.

Can't really comment because of the quality of the photo, it's just looking blue for me :s. I'm sure it look's much better in person though, perhaps take a better picture if possible?

Is this picture better?

Back side

Maybe a bit of skull white in whatever you are painting around the edge to make it more pronounced.

Also, be sure to try and pick out the little cable detail.

If anything I would say it was a bit dark (regardless of the dark picture).

The colour fading looks okay from the picture though..

Looks a little dark for my taste. Are you trying to wet blend or just painting right on? It also looks like the front side is brighter than the back side maybe that is just me.

I normally wouldn't go with such a dark blue you might want to try painting the entire sword Teclis Blue and then transitioning into Hoeth Blue and then the very top 50/50 Hoeth Blue/White Scar.

Use the wet blending technique if you are going to try it (lots of guides on the interwebs for it).
YOu could also just paint it up Teclic blue and do some white lightning effects on it and just edge highlight with 50/50 Hoeth blue/White scar.

it's difficult to tell with these pictures. abstain from using your cellphone. it's not a camera, it's a phone.

What I do is pick a base color and a target color, of the same hue (so, purple, or green..... etc). apply the base color, then use progressively lighter colors to apply narrower and narrower bands of lightning, then move past the color up into whites. with the white I'll have some of the forks split and merge again, or very short narrow ticks off of the main artery. The the glowy bits will look flush against the weapon, and the non-glowing ticks will look like they're popping away from the blade.

I feel like your brush isn't thin enough to do the lightning quite right. Also, don't be afraid of having one or two forks of lightning loop around the blade, just be careful you line it up properly. It's fine to have the lightning zag back and forth, as well as up and down. Throw down your main artery, and then start zagging off of it. The white parts of it also doesn't need to be a single solid line, it can peter out and fade back in, it adds the 3rd dimension to the paint job.

Yea your picture is very dark it just looks very blue. I can't do the reflective effect but lightning is pretty easy actually as long as you build it up to white like poda said.

It looks very blue and dark.

Here is some advice for a quick power weapon look without spending too much time doing wet blending on it.

Paint the blade with a silvery color.
Draw small ilghtnings or effects with a pure white on it.
Glaze with Guilliman blue. This will tint the metal but the lightnings will pop out more.

 Erik_Morkai wrote:
It looks very blue and dark.

Here is some advice for a quick power weapon look without spending too much time doing wet blending on it.

Paint the blade with a silvery color.
Draw small ilghtnings or effects with a pure white on it.
Glaze with Guilliman blue. This will tint the metal but the lightnings will pop out more.

Take this with a word of caution. I should have said the same warning about my method as well. Just because a method works for someone, doesn't mean it works for you. I don't like my power swords looking metallic. Many people who do paint their power swords using reds oranges and yellows don't use metallic, because a hot glowing thing typically does not reflect electromagnetic radiation so much as emit it's own.

So, i guess going back to what you did, it's hard to tell whether you succeeded in your attempt based on:
a.) the poor quality of the image,
b.) not knowing what you did,
c.) what you were trying to imitate.
Maybe if you can get us a cleaner picture with good lighting along with a link to relevant video and a description of what you used (maybe you used different colors), we'll be in a better place to help you out, rather than just us all telling you how we like our power weapons.

For better images, clean up the lens, and set up a light box. If you don't have a light box, what you can do is use natural light, or take a WHITE light lamp, grab a thin white material (sometimes paper can do it, sometimes it's a t-shirt stretched out) to filter the light so that there are no hard shadows (or, you can bounce the light off of the ceiling or white paper... etc), and just make sure you also set up paper or cardboard or something around the background so the model stands out and the colors come out cleaner. Something in your background could be fiddling with your color in the foreground. There are better instructions on dakkadakka for how to take photos, I'm offering mine just as a quick suggestion.

Here I got a real camera. Let's see how it looks.

PS: What do you think of the storm trooper.

For the overall consistency, yeah, i think this looks good. You do obviously have much to improve on, but you won't learn anything reprinting one model. The power weapon looks decent. As fort eh trooper, all I see is black. I like the skin tone, but if you could go in with one shade higher and touch up the brow, cheek and nose, that'd look spiffy. The gun needs some banging up, wear and tear work, faded and chipped paint, and, again, just pick our the edges with lighting. Not sure what you wee going for with the uniform though.

I was going with a black armor and blue cloth theme. When I painted this I was thinking the coloring should be dark to cause fear in any cultist/imperial rebels that the storm troopers are fighting against.

Heres him next to a regular guardsmen.

Yeah

The axe above me looks a little unrealitic and chalky, the lightning is too thick.

If you wanna pull lightning off, try to thin the white paint down a lot and literally just drag the very fine tip of your brush across it. Lightning is jaggered, irregular and thin. It's not chunky and predictably patterned.