Daemonifuge Commission

With my move back to Colorado behind me, I broke in the new painting desk with another commission! Rob saw my Tron Harlequins and asked me to paint these two in that style, to join his army of Synthwave Sisters of Battle. Since I’ve already written about how I painted the Harlequins I’ll be brief here, I used a very similar technique with a few added steps to get a nicer overall effect.

To start, we discussed some minor conversions to the minis and I mocked up some test schemes in Photoshop to give an idea of how I could paint them. Both ended up getting Harlequin masks and mohawks, because they’re so damn cool 😀

Both were then primed black, and then painted black again to get an even coat and make touch-ups easier later. Over this I did a sort of Zenithal highlight to the black by mixing in a tiny amount of the intended neon color to Abaddon Black and roughly defined some of the volumes.

With this groundwork in place I moved right on to the line highlights. With both bases I first did a thick highlight with a mid-tone, then came back to do a thin highlight with white. To get the greens right I knew from experience that I couldn’t just glaze over white, so for that color I built up several layers of green edge highlights before going on to spot highlights with white. The minis themselves got the thin white edge highlights, setting me up to begin glazing in the various bright neons.

There wasn’t a whole lot more to describe at this stage, I glazed those translucent neons over the white, then came back to re-highlight some areas with white again, repeating wherever I felt necessary. I did some freehand on the cloth and smooth mask to create a sort of digital texture, again glazing in colors, re-highlighting, and repeating until it looked right. When it came time for the blade I realized that it would take more get right the right hues, so much like the green I did several layers of orange highlights, white highlights, glazes, and finally white at the end again. Something about blue and pink/fuchsia lends itself really well to this type of glazing technique, but I’ve ordered a bunch more Vallejo fluorescent paints to mess around with in case there are others that I could use for my Harlequins to save myself the extra steps when I branch out more to other colors.