"Some Malifaux Steampunk Conversions on my Blog" Topic

link

Thanks for looking,
-Joe

Nice work! Good conversions, nicely painted.

You asked for advice, so… perhaps the problem with the object source lighting on the pistol-toting magician is one of the following things:

1. There is no object! The light source lies outside the 'diorama' of the figure and its base. This relies on the viewer using more imagination than if there was a gas lantern, ball lightning, pistol discharge or whatever 'in scene'.

2. The bright highlights are white. If you shine white light on various surfaces (cloth, metal, wood, etc) few of them actually become white. They are not white to start with. They instead become brighter versions of their normal colours.

Fixing #2 will also probably fix #1. The first problem will not be noticeable if you can get rid of the second one. I see two options:

Repaint the highlights so that they aren't pure white. The catch is that this will be hard to tell apart from normal highlighting (because of #1 above), so I don't recommend this option.

Or, you can use a coloured light source. Red? Blue? Yellow? Shine a light of this colour on wood/metal/fabric etc. and it WILL appear to change colour. You may find it easier to ignore the real-world physics of which things should appear lighter or darker (e.g. a red object is actually black under green light), as you can probably get away with a simpler comic-book-like technique where everything becomes redder, or bluer, or whatever.

By using a coloured light source, it will also be instantly clearer to the viewer that this is not just your everyday highlighting, and that even though you can't see it, there must be a light source somewhere out-of-scene.

Now that I think about it, I can't recall ever seeing OSL done well using white light. Painters always seem to go for one colour or another.

As an example of how coloured OSL can't be mistaken for highlighting, here's some of my work. I used warm lighting (reds, oranges, yellows) and lots of green in the 'shadows' so I didn't just have to use boring detail-obscuring black. I think it also helps that the light source is very obviously included in the scene.

link

Looking at the photos on your blog again, the one where the magic-user is standing next to the streetlamp looks pretty good! I know the position of the light source and the inferred position based on the cast shadows don't match. But it really helps just having a credible light source nearby.

See thats what I mean. In the pistol toting magician is supposed to be holding a brigt blue flame in his outstretched hand. That was the light source I was working from. Perhaps I should brighten the spell effect in his hand so it looks like it would cast that much light. I imagined that the spell would be about as bright as an archwelder flame.

picture

That was the effect I was going for. You can see in the above picture how the extreamly bright light makes the dark mask look light blue and white in places. In reflection i think I over did it.

Thanks for the comments guys. I apreciate the input. keep 'em coming.

-Joe

Looks great!

Oh, the thing in his hand is the light source? Then it needs to be waaaaaay brighter. Like in the arc welding photo: the light source is the brightest thing around. Also in that photo you can see that almost none of the person is lit up 'white'. All of the bright areas have a strong blue tint to them. I think on your model there is too much white light and not enough colour. Perhaps some glazes over the existing paintwork could help with this.

Thanks, Static Tyrant. I think I'll give that a go.

-Joe