Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Color Question: Dark Eldar Army Scheme

by SandWyrm

I've been a huge fan of the site for a while now and I've got a color-related question that I was hoping you could help me out with. I'm trying to come up with a scheme for my DE and am having some trouble figuring it out.
From the beginning, I knew I wanted my scheme to revolve around having bone-colored armor. Then I thought it might be neat to have something dark behind it to create an interesting contrast. So, for example, a Warrior might have bone-colored armor plates and the parts underneath the plates (back of the legs, etc) would be black.

Then I was browsing around and found the attached picture.
"Wow, that looks pretty sharp" thought I, and so I came to the scheme that I am currently stuck on. Bone-colored armor, black under-items, red accent bits. Seems like a good idea to me.

Except now I'm stuck. Not all models can be painted with just 3 colors, so I tried to come up with additional, complimentary colors using the wheel-method you usually advocate. That's when I realized that my scheme was basically a neutral color, black, and red. This is sort of making it tough for me to come up with ideas for additional colors. I was thinking perhaps some sort of cool blue/aqua color would be good since bleached bone is kind of a yellow or an orange and so going for something in the blue to green range would be a good idea, but I'm not sure.

That's where I was hoping you could help. What can I do?

Is there something I can use instead of black to make this scheme more interesting, but still have that sort of look?

Would the blue/aqua be a good idea? How about a blue/purple? Or both?

I think using a color scheme where the main colors are black and neutral is problematic, but that bone/black/red just looks so sharp. Help!

Zheilt

SandWyrm's Reply:

Sorry for the delay in getting to this.

The scheme in your attached picture is a light, desaturated orange, with red accents. Black isn't a color, so it doesn't contribute to the scheme. What you have here is a warm analogous harmony. With a little bit of complementary cyan shading on the black bits.


But, if we take that light, desaturated orange (bone), and make it a light desaturated blue-cyan (bone in blue light) instead, then things get much more interesting from a Dark-Kin standpoint.


Then, if we trade the black for a lighter desaturated blue-cyan, we get something similar to the fetching young thing from Tron at the top of this article. With saturated blood accents.

That's what I'd go with.

2 comments:

  1. Personally I'd go for a deeper blue on the under-armour and bump the red highlights round to a strong orange.

    I've never really felt comfortable with the direct cross-wheel contrasts. I don't know why but going a bit round the wheel to say orange-blue or violet-green really looks much nicer to my eyes:

    http://staff.tankrush.com/~korona/eldarcolour.jpg

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sorry for double-posting, is there an edit button?
    I was thinking, since he wants more colours, maybe also slip in some off-magenta for the under-armour to get that extra colour in? (pic updated).

    The blue tinge is really cool though, using bone looks weird for space armour and the blue is a subtle way to bring out the highlights.

    ReplyDelete

out dang bot!

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