Painting a starry/galaxy cloak

[Skits]

Hi all! After painting my 30k Ahriman, I had several people asking how I painted his galaxy cloak. I finally got around to doing a tutorial on the general method with my 40k Ahriman (although I think I went a little overboard on the density of stars with this guy, oops). Anyway, here we go:

1. Black base! Although any kind of really dark colour would probably work.

2. Dapple on your first dark colour (in this case red), in the general area/pattern you want your galaxy effect in. For this one, I decided to try a spiral galaxy effect rather than a more random nebulae like I used on my 30k Ahriman. Make sure your paint’s fairly thin, and you can let it pool in certain areas to get some variation in coverage. It helps to have reference pictures!

3. Continue with whatever other dark colours you want to use - for this example, I went with pretty much the full spectrum just to demonstrate the different colours and transitions between them.

4. Once those are dry, start dappling thin layers of brighter colours a little more sparsely over the previous colours. You also don’t have to stay entirely on the previous layer, it’s okay to go over onto the black areas as well. In this particular photo, I’ve only done some red/orange and some green so far.

5. Continue dappling those brighter colours on! Here I’ve continued with teal, purple, more red, and blue. Make sure your paint’s thin enough that it’s still a little translucent - you can also push it around a bit to leave it thinner in some areas and more concentrated in others.

6. Keep building up thin layers of brighter colours over the previous layers. In this pic I’ve moved on to orange and yellow over the previous red areas.

7. I kind of skipped ahead a little here and continued on right up to white in just the central area of the spiral.

8. Once you’re up to the brightest colours, just start dotting it on in individual spots, rather than dapples like before. Here I’ve done the green, teal and blue. Make sure to rest your hand often if it start cramping up!

9. Here I’ve continued on with the violet, red, orange and yellow dots.

10. Finally, carefully dot on white paint for the brightest stars, including a few larger ones with added little shine lines. Try not to go too overboard with them though (like I did here, oops) - leave some areas with not as many stars.

If you’ve only used two or three colours (instead of a whole spectrum like I did here), you can also use a wash over the whole thing to help tie the different areas of colour together, then go over it with some more white dots again. I did this on my 30k Ahriman with a blue wash, since all the colours I used in that one had blue in them. You can also go back with the black to add in some more random patches with less stars to help break things up a little.

Anyway, that’s pretty much it! It does take a while (I think I spent about five hours overall on this, though it would’ve gone a lot faster if I wasn’t using so many different colours and also not stopping regularly to take photos). I hope it helps, and please let me know if you have any questions!

[GrandMagnus]

Far ouuuut, maaaan. What a triiiiiip! :P

Looks really really great, nice tutorial

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Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds!

 

Love it, looks awesome!!!