Hey everyone! I thought I'd share how I painted white feathers in a way that takes quite a bit of patience, but not a ton of skill. It's easy to do, and you can get convincing-looking feathers like this:
You can apply the same technique to painting any white model, such as White Scars. It's not hard to do, but it is pretty slow, and requires a lot of waiting for paint to dry.
The key thing to remember when painting white is that when you observe white naturally, very little is actually *white*. Most everything is shades of grey tinted by the color of lighting, so when we finish with our model, only the brightest areas will be actually white.
To paint these wings, I used only the following paints: White Scar, Nuhln Oil (Shade), Guilliman Blue (Glaze), Lahmian Medium.
Prep the model by priming the wings white and giving it a coat of white scar thinned slightly with lahmian medium, to make the surface smoother.
1. Using a standard palette like one of these
http://www.amazon.ca/LINGS-SHOP-22x17cm-Alternatives-Watercolor/dp/B00T2EYWYA/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1438279500&sr=8-3&keywords=palette+painting , I fill two discs about 1/4 of the way with Lahmian Medium. On one of them, using a mixing brush (an old paintbrush), I put about two dolops of Nuhln Oil. That is, I drown the brush with Nuhln oil, mix it in with the Lahmian Medium, go back, and do it again. The resulting mix looks like a very diluted Nuhln Oil.
(EDIT: I had said 1/2.. a cup, it should really be around 1/4. But this will vary depending on your cup size, obviously. The gist of it is, a LOT more medium than paint or glaze!)
Don't be cheap and make too little glaze, because you need to have enough glaze for at least the same side on both wings, or they won't look consistent. And unlike paint, you go through glaze pretty quick.
It's really important to note that we're not going to *wash* the feathers. We're going to glaze (tint) them, and feather it out so that the recesses are darker, and the raised areas are whiter, without overdoing the amount of paint going onto the white. If you just paint a wash onto the white, what happens is that the raised areas dry all splotchy, and you spend tons of time fixing that, and you end up with brush strokes delineating the white and the grey areas instead of a soft transition.
2. I prepare two paintbrushes. For this, I used the Citadel Glazing brush; any small fine brush will do, but I found that I ended up really liking the Glazing brush because it holds just the right amount of paint for me. The first is going to use my tinted glaze, and the second is going to just use Lahmian Medium (the glazing medium). I wet the second brush with Lahmian medium, and dry it a little bit on the back of my hand. I want it to be damp, not sopping wet.
3. With just a little bit of grey glaze on my first brush, I carefully apply glaze to just the recess of one feather. Now, if I just let it dry like this, there would be a noticeable line between where I glazed and the white. So, while the glaze is still wet (I have lots of time), I take the second brush, which only contains medium, and gently paint from the edge of where my glaze ended, to the edge of the feather. The tinted glaze will mix in with the untinted medium, and the result will be a soft transition.
Just repeat for all the feathers. Once you get the hang of it, you can probably glaze a couple of feathers, and then feather them at the same time, to speed things up, but don't get greedy. It will look ugly if the glaze starts to dry before you feather it out.
4. When you're done, let it dry COMPLETELY. Don't do the other side of the wing. Resist the urge! It's a good time to do the OTHER wing though. Once it's totally dry, it will probably be too faint. If it's not, your glaze is likely too heavy. Repeat step 3 again, which will darken your feathers a little again, and accentuate the shadows.
The more times you repeat step 3, the gentler your transition will be. So, you need to balance the amount of time you want to spend doing this, and how soft you want the transition to be. With some experience, you'll know how much glaze/paint (or shade) ratio you want to use.
Once you're happy with one side, flip it over and do the other side.
5. Once the grey is to your satisfaction, you can just leave it, or, in my case, I decided to tint it blue, slightly. To do this, I do mix up Guilliman Blue with lahmian medium, in about the same proportion as I did with Nulhn Oil. I want a lot of medium, a little pigment.
6. Instead of only appling glazing the deepest recess, I allow more of my tinted glaze onto the feather. Then, when I use my second brush, I gently pull that glaze towards the edge, which gives the feathers a soft, blue (and more natural) look.
An optional step -- This is totally optional, and has the potential to wreck all your hard work if you don't do them just right.
7. With only the tiniest amount of paint (and I mean TINY) on a small drybrush, I gently drybrushed the tight feathers perpendicular to the direction of the feathers. Then, with a TINY amount of paint on a medium drybrush, I drybrushed IN the direction of the long feathers. Keep in mind how large the feathers at the end of the model are; most wings (like Sanguinary guard) aren't like this.
The drybrush gives the feathers some sharp highlights on the small feathers, and gives directionality and grain to the longer feathers, which had no detail sculpted on them. But if you apply too much drybrush, it will look unnatural and you get to scrub your feathers and start again
This also only works if your surface is totally prepped and smooth. If you drybrush an uneven surface white, the imperfections will all catch and cast shadows, again, looking unnatural.
Obviously, the paint must be totally, 100% dry before you drybrush. Otherwise, it's a horrible mess
This process takes some patience, simply because you're always waiting for glazes to dry. After all the feathers were done, I used the same glazing technique on parts of the wing frame (the top), and used white scar to edge highlight it (which you can't see much of on the photo).
Incidentally, don't do an edge highlight against a glaze if you're not very confident that you can get it right in one pass, because there are no second chances; the glaze is really hard to fix.
Also, you can use this same technique to blend any two similar colors without a lot of the voodoo magic of wet-on-wet blending, which takes a lot more practice. This is very similar to the 2-brush blending technique that
PP popularized, where you paint one color down, and before it dries, you feather it with water to blend it into the adjacent space. But, that is not easy on white, because ANY pigment contrasts sharply against white, and you need to have no edge at all (or at least a very large, gradual edge) if you want the transition to be smooth.
Hope this is interesting or helpful!
