I fought hard for the following pictures. University is claiming most oft he time and all my energy, i am in constant shift between excercising/preparing and napping.

It has been a while, i talked to one here on dA about preshading. Even though i had some ideas of how it should work i hadn’t had a chance to verify it. But with the time i hacked the experiments could be done!

Originally i was about to paint these Tau Fire Warriors all the same. Aiming for the old sandcolored tau, i bought the colors i wanted to use and thought about how to achieve said look. But then i reminded myself oft he phase i am going through right now: finding my style for the next army. Tob e fair, this phase does include fun painting, which i will have more than enough of.

So the idea was born to use most of the fire warriors to test which green colors works best and what color to use for preshading. Without further delay, let’s see what i did.

1.: This is my testing setup. Eight Fire Warriors were „sacrificed“ to prove a point. The other two are not part of this test.

2.: After the preshading is done, this is what i got out of it. Why did i choose the colors i did? The red one, well, red is the complementary color to green. A obvious choice. Blue, being more of a shadow color i was confident this would be a good try. Black, yeah, it’s dark! Artists aren’t that keen on using black as it only prduces a dirty color, thus ist o be avoided. But it is important to see why it should not be used! The brown color wasn’t really something i was expecting to be a good choice. I had it up to paint some of the other models, so i gave it a try!

3.: A closeup. This is one of each preshade. How will they do? Which one will appear most realistic? Which green tone ist he one that impresses me the most?

4.: Coloring done! Good luck actually seeing something in this picture! It does look quite uniform, but a closer looks will prove you wrong! In order to blend over the preshaded areas it 2-4 layers until i was satisfied with the results. A detailed analysis will follow soon.