I have posted a variety of articles on the blog about Non Metallic Metals and how I ended up using that technique. The primary reasons are that it is what I am requested to do, and it is also due to the 20+ years spent painting in 2D art. There are no metallic watercolors, pastels or oils, so you have to simulate the impression of metal
This is what I have been doing for 17+ years of miniature painting, but running across this old guy made me try something new.
It had been mostly painted way back in 2004, when we briefly messed around with metallic paints. The base was made during my Painting Pyramid Kickstarter, and I wanted to see if I could make the metallic paints work with the glowing effect!
First, I had to get a variety of cooler tones in the metals. I had always wanted to try the Vallejo Metal Medium, which turns any color into a metallic paint.
You can see me doing that in these images. I am using the same green color that was mixed into the grays for lighting the cloak.
The more of the Metal Medium you add to the mix, the "lighter" the color becomes. This proved to lend a lot of flexibility to the process.
I added a few other colors to the Metal Medium as well, and it was very interesting!
I even mixed in some of the Vallejo Glaze mediums, and that made a very nice effect, as it is already transparent. Now the metals had a variety of warm and cool colors, and these would help to set up the brighter more intense tones of the lava reflections.
To ensure that the lava reflections would still look like metal, I could mix in the Metal Medium with the fluorescent paints! This was crucial, since it is one reason why I had abandoned metallic paints. They would not work with things like Object Source Lighting, since the "reflections" would stand out like a sore thumb against all the metallic shininess.
In fact, adding that Metal Medium gave the fluorescent paints just enough of a 'shine' so that it would incorporate itself very well. I had to remember not to add that medium when I painted the effect on the cloak!
There was not a ton of the reflected color on the figure... just a few strategically placed areas to create the impression of them.
I might actually have to do a Patreon Page video regarding these, as it was a lot of fun, and I felt like I was discovering new things with each brush stroke, just like the oil paints!
If you would like to support that Patreon Page, any amount would make it easier for me to create more of those videos... and you would also have a chance to win the monthly raffle figure!
He's also here:
