Blue lighting effect

Last year I picked up one of the Games Day models and was terribly slack about painting him. On the upside it meant that when I decided in early April 06 I needed to paint a model with some in-model light sourcing he was sitting right there in his blister looking all perfect for the job. Colours are Citadel unless otherwise stated.

I started off by painting his powerfist, the source of the light. I'd usually leave this step till later, but for the sake of the photos I thought I'd start off with the bit that 'glows'. So the 'fist' part and the little gems on his knuckes were painted with a bright blue (Enchanted Blue with a touch of Regal Blue)highlighted up to mostly white:

Next I painted his eyes and teeth. This would have been a pretty quick stage except I messed up one eye and had to repaint it about 3 times. Argh.:

Following that I started on his skin, which is a mix of Dwarf flesh and a touch of Shadow Grey, highlighted with bone and white. I like to start basecoating skin by going round the tricky areas and then filling in the rest. I painted the 'normal' highlights first:

Next it was onto the blue. I picked up a glob of the base colour, put it on a new pallette and mixed in some Enchanted Blue to lay over the blue-lit areas. Note how it's almost entirely one side of his face, but that a bit of his cheekbone picks it up too - his eyelid is masked from the light by his nose:

Highlights were made by mixing in a little more enchanted blue and a little of the lighter colours from the 'plain' skin pallette, until it got to a colour I liked. At that point I started using white in the highlighting mix. It's a pretty intuitive sort of phase - just go till you like it.

Armour= dark red (a mix of Black, Vallejo MC Flat Red and GC Royal Purple, highlighted with VMC Flat Red, and I think a bit of Space Wolves Grey and VMC Flat Yellow then white). Again, I painted the regular-light highlights first:

Then mixed blue into a lighter version of the base. One thing to note is that mixing in the 'light' colour can make the basecoat darker, which might not be what you want. So rather than mixing the blue into the basecoat you may want to mix it with one of the highlights. The weather is getting pretty cold here now so my paint's not drying that quickly on the pallette which does make this easier.

Basecoat of the blue-lit areas, taking into consideration the areas that will be blocked by his backpack:

A couple of highlights into the blue:

Here the armour is fully highlighted, his bone-coloured shoulderpads are painted (Must have forgotten to take a pic of that in progress) and the gold areas are basecoated. The bone shoulderpads are a very simple Graveyard Earth basecoat, Bleached Bone mixed highlight and then a bit of white added for the last couple of highlight stages. For

The gold base is a mix of Vermin Brown, Snakebite Leather and VGC Royal Purple:

Here the 'normal' gold is painted and the first level of the blue-lit gold has been painted - you can see that the colour shift toward the greeny-blue is very slight because of the thin layers. It shows up best on the top of his belt-skull.

Gold is now fully highlighted, and the effect is starting to come together quite nicely:

Here the steel-metal is fully highlighted too, and the pictures super-fuzzy. The metal is a basic grey using black highlighted with white:

Finished (except for the base), with various other little details like the gun casing, purity seals and little gems.