I am struggling with Object Source Lighting. I have started the first flagellant that will have the effect and well parts of him look good. I struggled first with painting the flames as they should be. I have managed that decently but not perfectly.
The Flame: I began with a solid white basecoat which I washed with yellow a number of times to build up the colour. I then washed orange over a smaller area and finally some red. This turned out oaky. The problem I have encountered is that the flame tongues are rather large and round and almost feed from the base of the flame right to the top. This means that when washing the watered paint will still run to the base if too much is applied. I had to thicken the paint a little more to prevent it running too much. Eventually I realised that this was not enough and went back over the entire flame with a yellow wash. This tied stuff together well but sat deeply in the long crevasse at the centre of the flame giving a solid yellow centre that didn't look right. I went along then and shaded the flames to remove some of that yellow and enliven the whole effect I darkened the tips to GW red gore with a little black at the very top. I will have to go back and ass some white to the flames I think but so far they seem to have come out alright considering that I have done them rather quickly. There is a good tutorial here.
The Light: This is tough. A lot tougher than I imagined and I didn't help myself much with the colours chosen. The problem I am having is with the change in the spectrum of the light due to its proximity to the source. I was using Vajello Hot Orange for my light base colour which I intended to highlight with a little yellow. Firstly the model I was working on had blonde hair. Straight away I didn't really know how to proceed. Eventually I felt brave and just applied some orange 'highlights' to the hair. I remember Old Fogey on the Warhammer forum remarking that OSL was just highlighting with different/funny colours. With that in mind I applied some yellow over the orange around the hair and face. This is the area closest to the flame. I then washed this with Baal Red to see what happened. Once dry it looked great! So I am pretty happy with the face. The light skin and hair took the paint and OSL well.
Now everything else I wanted to put the light on was further away and as such the light would have grown less intense. I felt that the orange was still fine and that a slight yellow highlight would be best. I went straight to the dark green robes and put on the Orange. Immediately this was looking wrong. The orange gave a strange effect. I continued onto the arm holding the brand and applied the orange. Again it looked wrong. I continued as sometimes only once the model or technique gets close to being done does it start to look correct. Alas this still ended up a failure. I washed it with red to darken the colours but no that didn't help. Simply put it was terrible.
I still don't have it figured out but I went back and in putting the base coat over everything again I realised that maybe I was forgetting to generally highlight the robe around the light source and that leaving it dark just wouldnt work. The daylight faded here now so tomorrow I will continue. What I am guessing I need to do is give the robe in this area a much lighter tone highlighting it up well beyond what I have done in the other areas. Once this is complete I can then apply some of the light from the source. I really don't have a clue what colour I should use. Stick with an orange or change to red? Hopefully this will be the solution I need. A good look at some different light sourced models can be seen here.
The flesh is a different story as it is the exact opposite of the robe and is already very light. When reappling the GW Tallarn Flesh basecoat it looked horrible. I will have to redo the arm completely. I experimented with some red gore as a wash along the skin but it looks a little like blood. Possibly some vajello Hot Orange would be best? As this part is of the same intensity/distance as the adjacent robe I am assuming that they would both need the same colour. However as one comes from such a dark base and the other such a light one I can't seem to get it to work. I remember that Curse of Beers on the Warhammer Forum mentioned that the object recieving the light needs to be dark enough to show it. Maybe that is where I am going wrong with this? I need to have dark skin.
I have seen a great article here that deals with a blue light source. I really think that I could manage that fairly easily. It seems that the more fickle spectrum of fire light is causing me a lot of problems. Anyway it seems I will have to start bugging some better painters than I for some answers!
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