Ben's done some artwork

Well alright it's not quite artwork (and certainly not my usual high end Crayon daubings) but in this apocalyptic desert heat we've been having here in the UK, painting has become a battle. So rather than potentially mess up a model, I've gone back to something I used to do when planning armies or paint jobs, making up some physical colour swatches.

Last time I was talking about the nostalgic inspiration for some Emperors Children miniatures I've put together as a little side project, the excellent Slaaneshi army by Johan Kolkjaer, "The Children of Lishtaar". The army has such an eye catching warm orange/peach hue to the armour panels, I want to replicate it in my own warband.

I've used photoshop to assess colour schemes and paint jobs before (colour sampling from reference images to match paints to is great) but as this is only inspired by, and not a direct copy, I wanted to experiment with the paints in my collection to achieve the look I was after.

So I had a rummage through the vast collection of paints at the studio and grabbed out any that might do the job, and sorted them into (roughly) shadow, mid-tone, highlight and a few outliers that might work for glazing in some interest into areas.

After a bit of fingerpainting I had a sheet with all the colours laid out and could begin a proper assessment. Quite few of these looked totally different out of the pot so bear that in mind for your own testing.

I was able to write off a few pretty quick as too brown or too desaturated, and narrowed it down to a few that might work nicely together.

Yes I know my handwriting is terrible, please ask in the comments if you can't read anything

I then quickly sketched them out to see how they would look running from deepest shadow to the brightest areas of light. The majority of the armours colour will sit somewhere within the centre 1/3rd of that bar (the mid-tone), with the darkest and lightest colours at either end being used in extreme cases.

I'm pretty happy with this stage of the process. Its super quick, and worth doing if you aren't sure on your scheme before you start getting paint on a miniature. Be open to testing this out on miniatures (or spares from your bitzbox) before settling and don't worry if it takes a few rounds of testing to get what you are after. For example I'm pretty sure I will end up tweaking the ratios for the mid-tone to include more Light Orange, but I wont know till I try it.

Now if it could just cool down a bit I'll start putting paint to miniature and see how it looks!

cheers all

Ben