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evening dakka,

I want to duplicate this glowing eye lense effect for my night lords CSMs:



the guy that painted this base coated the eye with dark angels green, then applied several thin glazes of snot green + scorpion green, then a few glazes of just scorpion green and finally a highlight of white in the center of the eye and along the edge under the eye lense.

I gave it a whirl earlier using a base coat of scab red. for the glazes, I started with blood red/water/glaze medium and did a few layers over the eye and the lower rim. then I added a couple drops of white to the mix and did a few more layers, then a few more drops of white and another few layers. the eye lense lightened up towards white ok, but the area around the eye went deep purple rather than lightening towards red. I ended up with a cross between a black eye and pink eye :p

any advice for how to make this work for red eyes on dark blue armor?

You could try putting a base layer of white or maybe even a light blue over the dark blue area that you want the glow on and then start glazing.

I'd thought about doing that, but I'm not sure how to feather that light base layer out around the bottom rim of the eye. without that, the transition from glowing red to bruised purple is going to be really stark. seems like something an airbrush could do, but I don't have that much control over mine yet :p

The trick is red glows in weird ways. Just go out me night and pay attention to the red ignts or google it. Another problem is that...we'll.. Red isn't the easiest glow to pull off. I find myself going into oranges to make it look like glow, and it still doesn't look right on my stuff.

It may help to post an image irrespective of how bad the quality...

Pink might be easier to pull off.

I should have photos of a couple test models up this weekend

I would start with a good Matt grey then work my way up to bright red starting with orange for the flow effect, two brush blending will help a lot...

Here this might help http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9tAmSeb-Mk

skip to about 10 min, although its not a perfect glow around the eyes i think it could work if you do what Tarthenal seed "putting a base layer of white or maybe even a light blue over the dark blue area that you want the glow on and then start glazing", notice how well around the eye's the glowing green works on the white helmet picture you showed.

also check this out (http://www.coolminiornot.com/126956?browseid=4303453) in the link you see the armour is dark green but look closely under the eye and you can see a base white layer and a blue layer moving further out towards the green, in you'r case you could use a red layer slowly pushing out towards the dark blue armour then try the glaze over the top of that, but i think the key is having white just under the eye and red pushing out towards the armour.

hope some of this helps good luck.

This is one of the problems with trying to paint additive light effects using a subtractive medium. I guess it depends on the effect you are looking for, but by right a blue surface doesn't reflect red light... that's why it's blue. You would only expect to get the sharper spectacular reflections. If you are going for the more smoky glow effect, like there is some kind of fog or mist in front of the eyes giving off a glow, then I would fade your dark blue into back around the eyes to give some contrast (red light on blue = black) or grey like darefsky said. Then build your red glow on top / in front of that.

Though as has been pointed out... red lights usually tend to have a hotter orange element which would be more reflective (as opposed to pink). You might want to think about that too.

thanks for the links, trikss. I don't care for the all-over glow that an airbrush will give because its not very realistic; you end up with glow on things light from the eyes can't reach. I'm starting to realize that doing red over a dark surface just doesn't work well, as smacks and others have pointed out. I think I'll focus more on the glow within the eye lense instead of trying to make it spill out onto the armor and see what I can come up with