Help with Dryad Glowing Eyes/Mouths/Tattoos

[swarmofseals]

Crossposted with /r/minipainting:

I'm working on a test set of Dryads for this colorscheme and so far I'm mostly pleased with the results. These are inspired by the redwoods, which are often partially burned from forest fires but remain alive. All of these models have portions of healthy wood and portions that are burned, some much more severely than others.

I'm pretty happy with the wood. The photography is crappy, but the healthy wood looks good in person -- probably the best I've ever managed. The burnt parts look chalky from the drybrushing, but that's intentional. It's meant to look ashen.

I decided to do the eyes/mouth/tattoos in glowing green for the healthy parts and red/orange for the burned parts. Here's where I'm running into trouble. I think the greens for the most part look good. I'm happy with the effect on the eyes and mouths in particular. The tattoos/carvings look a little meh, but I'm not really sure what to do about that. Doing OSL type glow around them just makes it look sloppy, so I might drybrush over some of the brown tone to cancel out the green glaze around the tattoos.

The red, on the other hand, is not going as well. I'm not sure that it comes through that well in the pictures, but the red/orange eyes and tattoos look much worse. To be clear, I'm not painting red/orange over black. I know better than that. All of the red/yellow parts were painted a solid white first. For some reason I'm just not getting the depth that I got with the greens and I just don't know why. I'm using basically the same technique -- painting a mid orange, then highlighting a brighter orange, then shading with a darker ink, then picking out the brighter orange again and finally a little dab of yellow orange. Then one very dilute orange glaze around the edge.

Any idea what might be going wrong here? I'd love to get the red/orange to pop like the green does. Any advice on the tattoos/carvings for either the red or the green would also be appreciated!

EDIT: Just for reference, the colors that I'm using are P3 Iosan Green into P3 Necrotite Green with a wash of Scale75 Inktense Green, then P3 Necrotite Green again and finally a dab of mixed P3 Necrotite Green and Vallejo Model Color Flat Yellow. The glaze is then just Necrotite Green with Vallejo Glaze Medium. The reds are Reaper Lava Orange into Explosion Orange, then washed with a mix of Scale75 Inktense Red and Inktense Chestnut, then back to Explosion Orange and finally a dab of Explosion Orange mixed with Vallejo Model Color Flat Yellow. Glaze is the Explosion Orange with Vallejo Glaze Medium.

 

[Tzaangor Management]

I really like these. The idea behind the scheme is excellent and I must admit that I would not have noticed your point about the orange unless you'd mentioned it. To increase the contrast on the dark side, you could try mixing some blue into the black, or into the highlight colour to make the orange stand out a little more against it's opposite. You could even try a light or dark blue drybrush, followed by the ash drybrush, so that only a little of the blue shows through.

In your second to last picture you can see the sigil / tattoo thing contrasting with the blue of the tin behind and looking deeper than those higher up, so you might just be able to add some blue to your basing to make the orange standout more.

I'm definitely not expert, but blue is what I would try to increase the an orange contrast.

 

[swarmofseals]

1 hour ago, Tzaangor Management said:

I really like these. The idea behind the scheme is excellent and I must admit that I would not have noticed your point about the orange unless you'd mentioned it. To increase the contrast on the dark side, you could try mixing some blue into the black, or into the highlight colour to make the orange stand out a little more against it's opposite. You could even try a light or dark blue drybrush, followed by the ash drybrush, so that only a little of the blue shows through.

In your second to last picture you can see the sigil / tattoo thing contrasting with the blue of the tin behind and looking deeper than those higher up, so you might just be able to add some blue to your basing to make the orange standout more.

I'm definitely not expert, but blue is what I would try to increase the an orange contrast.

 

Interesting idea, I could definitely drybrush a little of a bluer grey tone around the runes. The vines and leaves are going to be painted in an ethereal scheme so I can go on the bluer end there which should contrast nicely with the orange browns and the reds. I think I'll try that and check back in. 

PS: The fluff idea here is that the vines, leaves etc. are all manifestations of life energy that are regenerating the burned wood -- that's why the areas near the leaves and vines are always healthier, and the burned areas tend to be far away from the leaves/vines

[Routasydän]

Id guess that youd have to have really bright red as a base (for mouths etc) mephiston or even brighter and the yellow should go up to whatever the brightest and like "whitest" is.  You could probably even skip one or two stages.  

Lovely idea with the theme,  looks really cool