Hey credit where credit is due. Lumineth had been on my radar for awhile now, I’ve been wanting to do a “frost elves” theme ever since the cities of sigmar book came out with phoenix guard and frost Phoenix featuring heavily. I’ve been interested in this theme again ever since the model range got released but most Lumineth schemes seem to focus on warm sun related colors and terrain and that wasn’t what I was going for. I’d never seen someone nail that cold atmosphere with the lumineth until your post.
I have an airbrush and am familiar with molotow and think very highly of their paints, to the the extent I’ve started exclusively using them for my airbrush primers. I think I will experiment with the green primer now that you’ve mentioned this, I’d never considered using green. Up until now I’d only been using black or occasionally purple (great for models with a lot of skin, I love their purple). I haven’t used many greens in my paint schemes yet so that will be interesting.
I feel like we are both at a very similar place in our airbrush learning experience because I think I understand exactly how you got the effect that you did with the airbrush now that you explained it, I recognized all the terms you used so you didn’t lose me. I’ve mostly been using vallejo metal color and valejo liquid silver/gold for my metallics since so far they are the best metallics I’d used. The info about scale 75 is a huge help to me, I had been trying to find another similarly good metallic range that had more variations in metal tones. Vallejo are great at achieving beautiful traditional gold/copper/silver by mixing them with eachother but I had been encountering issues mixing non traditional metallic colors like green gold or blue silver by trying to add colored inks to them without ruining the metal finish. Mixing my own regular non metallic colors was easy and fun and usually I prefer to do this, but the metallics I had trouble with because it was impossible for me to get the specific metal colors I wanted after trying several different methods.
You’ve sold me on buying some scale 75 to play with in the airbrush. Just by looking at your models it is obvious those metal paints look excellent. It looks like they have a wide range of color variation to them as well, so I thank you for setting me on the path to fiddling with that paint range for hours and hours haha.
Anyhow, thank you for the information, it was very useful to me and opened up some doors for me when it comes to getting more varied and interesting metallic colors. I’m always interested in hearing about knowledge, products, and tricks good painters layer to get great results. And it was pretty cool to see someone nail a cold/frost lumineth scheme so I could have proof it can be done and look wonderful!
Two questions going forward since I am still in the process of learning new “advanced” panting techniques. I’m familiar with using diluted mineral spirits to make my own oil washes as you mentioned, as I am currently in the process of practicing this on my current ironjawz project ever since I learned of this method a few months back. It is a game changer. Right now I only have black, umber, and magenta. Did you use black/umber, or some other oil color? I’m still learning how to incorporate more colors in my oil washes.
Second question is I am curious how you got your skin colors. Skin is of course very difficult and time consuming to blend, so you often have to zenethal models with a lot of skin the skin tones at the beginning of the painting process. I’ve done things like ironjawz Brutes where it was necessary for me to zenethol the entire model the skin tones first then have to go in by hand and apply all the metals.
Lumineth don’t have much skin showing so it appears you were safe to zenethal the entire model those nice scale 75 paints, yes? That would have left some of their skin metallic, and you’d have needed an opaque skin tone with a lot of covering power to go over the places where skin is showing. Is this correct? What paint did you use for the skin and cloth that effectively covered the metal zenethal you started with, if that is how you achieved your scheme? If I wanted to do a similar zenethal with metal colors of my own I would be very nervous about the paints I currently use not having the covering power to not bleed through a bit of metal if I wasn’t careful. I’ve never trued but I’d like to at some point. What paints did you use on the skin and robes/non metal areas?
