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Hullo all, and good morning.

I have an itsy-bitsy problem that needs handling with; what color to paint the plasma coils on my Sentinel. When i bought the sentinel and the according paints I neglected to remember small details such as lights and weapons such as this, so now I'm stuck without that nice deep sapphire everyone else uses. If anyone else has run into this problem, or, just for the hell of it switched the colors on their plasma weapons I would appreciate pictures and advice.

.My army is running for a arctic camouflage based mainly on light grey's.
.The current list of paints, primers, and washes I have with me are : Chaos black, Skull white, Codex grey, Fortress grey, Shadow Grey, Space wolves grey, Boltgun metal, Ice blue, Catachan green, Burnishd gold, Dwarf bronze, Badab black (Wash), and Thraka green (wash).
.I considered Ice blue but only as a last resort as it is part of the regular paint scheme.
.This isn't that urgent. I can always put off painting these small details until I reach home and have the right paints. But out of curiosity's sake and the will to go to unseen heights in plasma painting history I have decided perhaps to try my hand at using other colors.

Got a little mekboy in me.

Go for green.

A. Paint white.

B. Wash green. Happy with the green ?
1. Yes -> Highlight with white on the extreme of the coil fins. Go to C.
2. No -> Go to B.

C. Be happy.

Seb hit the nail on the head.

Some people usually drybrush over something like a white or black for the 'internal' part of the fins but it looks completely unrealistic, so just wash with whatever colour it will be then (i'd probably have a 50/50 colour of the wash + white highlight as well, just a teensy bit) finish.

Just make suren ot to get the powdery look, light is very smooth in real life.

This might also be of use (exchange whatever colour in place, the P3 chart is usually good at this) http://www.thepaintingshopworld.com/2010/08/06/i-show-you-how-to-paint-40k-plasma-gun-glow-effect/

Granted it has the black I mentioned and some strange OSL, but it can help with a guide to the drybrush/highlighting.

Were supposed to paint plasma coils a different color from the rest of the gun?

Whoops

I like to do whatevre works with the model's colour scheme. some troopers in my army are entirely red so I gave them blue and others which have blue as part of their uniform have blue plasma.

@seb: that method sounds so simple! would you happen to have any pics of the finished product? I poked around in your gallery but couldn't find any examples (did find some sexy CSMs, though!)

cheers

Thank you all for the replies.

Last night a few hours after posting this thread I came across this, http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/412835.page#3632263 .

And i tried to do it. Without an airbrush of course... (I'd actually bought one the day before and then returned it the next morning.) The pictures may not be good, (I took them on an Ipad, and I'm also not a good photographer.) but they are hopefully enough for some critique. I should be abel to find a camera and take some better ones within the hour though. So I will work towards that.







@Seb; Your method is intriguing and I shall either try it on my next one, or perhaps take off the paint on this one and do it that way.

@Shaozun; Good guide, as circumstance had it you posted it too late but i still used it to touch up mine.

I paint mine white and then give it a Blue wash. Looks really good and I have received several comments on them.

Ahh. And here are some better photos. After I touched up the gun (Among other things) a bit of course.
It should hopefully look better when I create the glow affect on the side of the sentinel's cockpit.

that's a big gun... took me a second to realize I was looking at the whole cockpit attached to it and not just part of a turret :p

first off, this is a great effort and I like the colors you've chosen. there are a few little details that nag at me, though.

to make OSL look right, you have to think about line of sight from your object (the coil) to every surface it can reach by following a straight line. all surfaces/edges in line-of-sight should have a bit of glow from the object, but surfaces that aren't in line-of-sight generally shouldn't (maybe a very muted glow to represent a secondary reflection off a directly lit surface). with that in mind, the bottom part of the smoke launcher should have a bright glow to it and the cockpit area above it probably shouldn't have any at all since the launcher blocks most of the light. similarly, the boxy bits behind the smoke launcher (the bit with the skull on it, etc) should have some glow on it's bottom and right edges, but nothing on the top or left edges. same goes for the wires along the bottom of the gun - there's no direct path for light to reflect off of them from the gun's coil, so they shouldn't have a glow.

minor details, to be sure, but I'm a details kinda guy hope this helps for the next one and I look forward to seeing more.

cheers!

Haha, Varl. The Sentinel cockpit is still a work in progress. I only stuck the Cannon on it for size comparison and a chance to see it in it's almost natural habitat.
The blue you mistook for OSL was actually a little experiment with Shadow grey to see if it would blend with my ramshackle paint scheme. It didn't. After the pictures were taken I did a bit more work and 'fixed' that area with a healthy dosing of Bolter metal.

My next step is to see whether I wish to tone the whole thing down a bit, darken it up, or actually make the damn thing black.

In future games I hope to use a black paint scheme for Commissariat Sentinels!




To my amazement I've only spent something like 13-14 hours on this so far, all of barely non stop work. (Albeit a five hour sleep break at around five AM last morn.) I get a bit of rest today though as I am traveling.

Also, i must ask a question to the group as i am rather new to this whole business. Should I make a Blog on Dakka to follow the sentinel and onwards to the rest of my army? Or should i wait until i've got some more work under my belt? I plan to do some heavy modifying once I get my Cadian command squad and greenstuff and So far many of the blogs I have seen are like this.

ah, well then. I look forward to seeing how the sentinel develops

as for starting a P&M blog, if you're painting and modeling, there's no time like the present to start your blog! no need to have a lot of work under your belt (I certainly didn't). start with what you've got now and months from now, when you have your 5000+ points army, you can look back at your blog and reminisce about when you had just one, lonely sentinel :p

Ok. I will start a blog after I do some more work on the sentinel, and write some fluff for my army.

Thanks for the support Varl.

Nice paint job, but I would go even brighter at the very center of the plasma, just to truly make it stand out.

Hmm, so a bit more skull white?

What would I use to give it a nice glossy finish on the light parts?

A little off topic but nice place to put the smoke launchers on the sentinel! Never even thougt of that.

When doing plasma coils I always reverse the normal dark/light paint routine. More specifically, normally the darkest points on the mini are going to be in creases, folds, or underneath grooves in the weapon. In the case of plasma you want it to glow, so 'shade' with your brightest blue right down inside only getting very gradually darker on the upper coils. Finally, if you want OSL this can be your darkest share.

Good job Seb.

Yeah, a lot of people make the mistake of painting a colour then highlighting the coils up to white. BUT, if the power/light is in the coil, it stands to reason that the brightest/whitest bit is the interior of the coil! I do Skorpion Green, then a wash of white paint, depending on how the wash goes i might drybrush a bit more green onto the coils. I try to avoid this though, as it can come off powdery....get the wash to the right consistency, practice practice practice!

Thank you for the suggestions Barksdale, Spaced.

I have two more Of these sentinels to do, so I will be trying your tips on them. For now though, I think this one is beyond any more messing around.

My biggest tip for you is water down your paints and do more layers on the bright ones.

Ahh, the blog is up. - http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/438367.page

And here is what the plasma cannon looks like after I 'brightened' it up.

That bottom sentinel plasma pic with the OSL and blue to central white is blinding and to me feels very plasma-y.

The wonders of flash my friend.