Glow in the Dark Test 02

My Spaz Stix paints arrived today (supplied in Australia by Qikazz), so I gave them a test with the glow powder.

The top three are yellow, orange, and fireball orange mixed with the pigment over white. The three on the left are over marcharius orange.


The clear winner is Fireball Orange over either colour in terms of glow, but the plain orange looks a bit better in daylight. The issue here is obviously that I was planning to black and yellow.
So I'm thinking of doing two sets of lines - yellow ones by hand with citadel, and larger orange ones with the airbrush. The Spaz Stix line is nasty airbrush stuff (nasty as in it is carcenogenic and has a warning label on it stating just that - wear your respirator!) so any use of a brush needs to be cleaned with thinner like enamel paints.

Problem there is the pigmented paint is 99& likely to gum up an airbrush. My thought is to airbrush a base coat down then hand paint on the glow sections over the top. This would have the advantage of making the glow slightly irregular and allow me to do false shading by not doing in the recesses and such.

Here's a shot from six feet away:


The glow is quite effective on just an hours charge by lamplight, so it'd be pretty good after a fair bit of daylight I'd imagine.

Current thought is to do a 'fake' glow with citadel paints as a base, tape off the main section, spray white down, spray orange over that, then hand do the pigmented mix. More testing to come.

Glow in the Dark test 01

So to follow up from the previous post I've tried a few different methods, including ink, water, isopropyl alcohol and different paints:


The best glow effect is from the pigment with water / alcohol, the good yellow one is from using sunburst yellow.
The trick is that the pigment isn't soluable, so getting the right amount of pigment to make a glow vs not having that horrible salmon colour is a bit tricky. Also it needs to be smooth enought to paint consistently with else the glow will be uneven.

Still, not a bad first trial run. I'll do another when the neon paints arrive.


On a related note I'm actually kinda pissed at Forge World right now, as "AdeptiCon attendees will be able to advance order the mighty Phantom Titan for despatch well in advance of the pre-order date" (from the newsletter).
I can dig Open Day getting cool stuff, but when it spreads outside of that it is basically a punch in the gut to loyal FW customers outside those attendees - "you like cool stuff? Too bad! You can wait because you're on the other side of the world!"

Keep in mind this was announced two days before AdeptiCon, which sold out ages ago, so it's not like there's any way to do anything about it unless you were already going.


Sent them an email asking for an approx release date and expressing my displeasure at the policy (though with less hostility than above). Australia gets screwed by Games Workshop all the time - look at the prices we get charged here* - but when Forge World does it, it's too much. If I don't get a reply by Monday I'm going to phone them.


* Marine Tac Squad - $62au, $37usd, £23. Convert $62au via actual exchange rates and you get $64usd and £39. Bit of a difference there, no?

Beginning of a new Project

Bag of mysterious orange powder:




Turn off the lights, and it glows:

to the extreme I rock the mic like a vandal, light up the stage and wax a chump like a candle.

Going to play around with this some and see what happens. Also waiting on some neon paint to come in the post. What's is all for?

PhanTRON titan

Yeeeeeaahhhhh!!

Going to do some testing on a Wratihlord for concept and practice.

Hasslefree Tomoko and Vissarisa

Finally painted up Tomoko (ie Major Kusanagi of Ghost in the Shell) by Hasslefree, in similar colours to her Stand Alone Complex guise. I think the shading came out very nicely on her jacket and bodysuit.

Here she is with the Firebrand Conscript I posted earlier. I kept the Major clean and smooth with a limited colour scheme to show her as a more professional fighter opposed to the Firebrand who is grittier and more thrown together.




She doesn't yet have a base as I'm going to give her a Sedition Wars one when they arrive to make her match the rest of my 'hard sci-fi' type minis.

Funnily enough Hasslefree put up a clear resin version of her, then sold out, while I was painting her. Oh well, I'll try and get one from the next run.


I've also been working on Vissarisa:



I still need to highlight her tabbard, face and give her shield a crest, but otherwise she's almost done.

I'm also trying (fairly unsucessfully) to fight off lust for the Phantom Titan. I'm thinking a dark greenish-blue colour scheme with glowing tracery over it, TRON Legacy style. I've played around in photoshop with the preview pics and I think it could work.