How-to Tuesday: Fiery Eyes

I don’t know if I’ll be able to get back to regular tutorials, but here’s a quick one about doing glowy eyes for warjacks, or anything, really. One cool thing about this is that while I’m callng this “Fiery Eyes”, this method works for any color you want to do.

I start with a white undercoat, and lay down the brightest color. In my case, this is yellow. I start with the brightest because these warm paints are notoriously transparent, so rather than try to work up yellow over darker colors, I want to cheat and put darker colors over lighter ones.

It may take more than one coat to get solid color. I think I put down two. I’m using P3 Cygnar Yellow. I also added some lines of color to the nearby ridges, to create an OSL effect. Use the side of your brush for this, it’s a lot easier than trying to draw the edge with the point.

Next, I start adding on a darker tone. For this, I used P3 Heartfire. It’s hard to detect in the pictures, but I covered the rear 2/3 of the eye. This color needed three coats to finally show up over the yellow. This is partly due to the transparent nature of the thin paint, and partly because the two colors are very close.

For the next step, I used P3 Khador Red Highlight, which is really just orange. I kept this to the rear 1/3 to 1/4 of the eye. If this color is too abrupt, you can mix in some of the Heartfire to lighten it up, or glaze the transition point with a few layers of thinned down Heartfire to smooth it out.

To punch up the contrast, I wanted to add just a hint of red, so I grabbed P3 Khador Red, and just lined the back edge, in a V shape.

This proved to be a pretty rough transition, though, so I went back along the edges of the eye with Khador Red Highlight, to sort of outline the eye some.

Glow effects should have a nice bright center, so I used white to bruighten up the leading edge of the eye, and draw a thin line backward along the center, ending about halfway back. This is optional, but I highly suggest at least punching up the brightness of the front edge.

I then glazed this white line with yellow, to reclaim some of what had been lost by all of the layers of orange.

And thus, a Fiery Eye for this Judicator head. For those who are curious, I’m not actually painting a Judicator. I’m painting something far cooler, far more autonomous, and one-of-a-kind.

Stay tuned!