How to paint Sector Imperialis Lamps

[RikuEru]

A friend and I are working our way through building and painting a large collection of scenery pieces.

 

My search skills were not good enough to find something similiar, but we could use a good guide on how to paint the Lamps that can be attached to walls in a good-looking, functional way (without just painting them yellow).

 

So how did you do yours?

Preferably only in Citadel colours, but anything is helpful!

[Damo1701]

 

 

[Arkhanist]

The standard approach to this is known as painting object source lighting, or OSL. It's pretty simple to do with an airbrush.

You can also do OSL effects with a brush, but it does take longer.

 

Here's an example (not mine) of building lights done with OSL. They list the colours in the article, and other types of lighting examples.

 

http://www.centerpieceminiatures.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/20150730-40k-Buildings-004-1024x683.jpg

[Toxichobbit]

I gnerally find that OSL done with an airbrush looks bad. It works ok on some stuff, the building above in the post above is one of the better examples, but generally it tends to give an effect that looks unrealistic, because the paint gets in places that wouldn't be illuminated by the light source. A perfect example is plasma coils, that when airbrushed, often have the light curling around the sides of the plasma gun in an unrealistic way. It's often overdone as well, resulting in something that would look out of place against anything but a black background (simulating a very dark area) and really out of place on a gaming table. The final issue with it, is that it just completely blocks out the original colour, Light doesn't do that unless it's very very bright. Just google OSL plasma gun and you'll see what I mean.

 

If you're going for nice OSL (which IMO is the only OSL worth doing), you want to strive for something like this

 

http://victoriaminiatures.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/DSCN3308.jpg

 of this

 

 

Those two are from Victoria Lamb and Jen Haley (two of my favourite artists when it comes to OSL), so I'm not suggesting try to get the same quality on your terrain as that would be madness. However, they are good examples of what can be achieved through more subtle use of OSL. The light source is obvious, realistic and brightens up the areas that it would shine onto without overpowering the colours underneath.

 

Here's a pretty good tutorial for achieving something similar. It's more work than airbrushing, but IMO worth it.