Choosing colours

[Angel Descendant]

Hey all,

 

I'm trying to choose the colours for my Raven Guard successor chapter. Theme-wise, they have a bit of an obsession with death and darkness, and come from a part of a planet that's in almost constant darkness. As such, I was planning on using models from both Forgeworld and the Legion of the Damned, to help put in some visual death references.

 

Problem is, I think the only colours that would really help the bone elements to pop out are black, or a very dark blue, grey or red. Then there are issues of black making them too visually similar to RG or LotD... Could someone please suggest a good colour scheme that will fit the morbid theme, help elements such as bone stand out, and still be reasonably distinctive?

 

Cheers

[Direach]

One option is to use an all-over black colour scheme, only instead of highlighting with grey or blue, use green. Building up highlights from Dark Angels Green to fine line highlights with Scorpion Green, combined with the bone motif, will lend an eerie luminous green suggestive of decay and a healthy green glow. Red or fiery orange eyes would be a good complement to this.

 

If you know you want a prominent bone motif, either sculpted bones or painted on, I don't recommend a mixed armour colour scheme; it will make the armour too busy and you'll lose the air of menace you want to evoke. That said, you could do a halved or quartered colour scheme with the armour and bone colours reversed on the split. This would probably look best with a vertically halved colour scheme; quartered and you again run into the problem of looking too busy (or worse, like a dalmatian or domino).

 

If you really want mixed colours, I'd recommend a combination of either very dark green, blue, or grey with black. Your best bet for a mixed colour scheme would be chest/torso, upper legs, and head in the actual colour, with lower legs/feet, arms/hands, shoulders, and backpack in black.

[Heru]

Flip the colours, make the armour bone and the bone elements black.

[BloodWulf]

I think shades of gray might work out well. Gray would look distinctive enough from Raven Guard and should allow the bone color to stand out well too.

[Angel Descendant]

Thanks for the help, guys.

 

Direach: green-highlighted black sounds awesome, thanks for your input, I'll have to give it a go!

 

I was also thinking of including some dirty white. Don't think it would work as a primary colour, but perhaps for one element of the armour. I was thinking of the arms, jury's still out on whether or not I'd do it for the shoulderpads as well.

 

Any thoughts?