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Hit there everyone,

I've got some Imperial Guard coming from a trade and I was thinking of a theme to use in painting the suckers. I know from experiance that dark colours make painting SOO much easier and that with 100+ Guardsmen planned, I'm going to need all the help I can get. As such, I was considering the darkest of th dark. Night-fight.

I've been trying to incorperate source lighting into my painting for a while now and this seems like a great oppertunity to do so. The Guardsmen will probably have either army green or blue uniforms and all the colours will be very muted for 80% of the models. The next step would be to choose the areas that are lit by flashlights, gun lights, whatever and paint these to look normal. The last step is to add the correct lighting effect. Flashlights will just leave a bright (sourced) highlight while stuff like plasma, power weapons, cigars, goggles, etc etc etc will all have their corresponding tinge.

Has anyone tried this before? Think it'll work? Will it be too wierd to have on the table?

I think if the source lighting is done right the effect could be cool. It will not be a slack-job either, I'd just rather spend less time highlighting up to bright uniforms and more time playing with all kinds of lighting. Worst comes to worst I can just add brighter highlights and bring the models into the light of day if I don't like it.

Thanks for any comments.

I think it runs the risk of looking like a bunch of unpainted models on the table.

This shouldn't keep you from trying. I would rather keep such an effect to one, maybe two, special squads, but thats just me.

Give it a go. I look forward to the result.

Hmm, it may look a little weird on the table, as everything else _won't_ have source lighting (unless you play in the dark and just point a flashlight at the table )

Are you trying to represent ordinary IG who happen to be fighting in the dark, or night-fighting specialist IG? The latter would certainly be easier and perhaps be a cooler theme - very dark uniforms designed to blend in with shadows, with a little highlighting to give visual definition, perhaps something similar to Black Templar colour scheme?