My first attempt was my Imperial Guard officer. Well, I say "first attempt" but i mean "first attempt that still exists on a model". Its pretty basic, just some layered colour moving up to the edge of the blade.
This is actually the third of fourth covering of paint on this guy's sword, which can't do it's edge any favours in a fight. Anyway, heartened by this I got confident for the Lord Commissar, read some online tutorials, and managed what I think is a pretty good Lightning Effect.
But the general look of a full blade still eludes me. When I finally bullet and redid my AoBR Marine Captain, I wanted to do something interesting on his sword, and after some mucking about ended up with a firey effect like this:
I think its a pretty good blended fire effect, but I'm still not sure it's wholly appropriate for a Power Sword effect, which should be more "glowey" and less like it's actually just on fire. So this weekend I've been messing about with the Termies consigned to the paint test bin, and the best effort so far is this guy:
Which I rather like. Not sure about the colour; it's a little cold but the technique may not be at the level of a lot of work you see around the place but I'm confident enough in it to stick up a picture on the internet, so that's progress!
The blue arm, by the way, is me practicing to get a blue-grey colour for a Librarian - more in line with the scheme used in Dawn of War over the brighter blue you often see.
The sword in the bottom picture looks great, a little bit like an ice sword, but the technique is there.
ReplyDeleteThere is a simple way to do the lightning effect on a power sword and Ron posted about it on FTW a while back. However, all it really comes down to is having the right paints. Enchanted Blue & Ice Blue will get you 90% of the way to a decent lightning effect. Just mix in a little white with the Ice Blue for your final highlight. The overall effect isn't as cold.
I've also seen a few nice effects that can easily be achieved with an airbrush, that I might try when I paint my Nemesis Dreadknight.
The really nice powersword effects are, as far as I can tell, real labours of love. The two powerswords I did for the Angel of Death took me ages and they are far from the quality you see from GW staff. Lots of blending for those. In fact, the one thing thats really stopped me progressing on my two Grey Knight character figures is the fact that I want to get the powerswords right and I know that will take me a while.
i'm pretty sure the FTW article was what i used as a basis for the lightning on the Commissar, and hopefully if/when i re-use it'll get that extra bit cleaner.
ReplyDeletevery tempted to re-paint over the marine captains sword though.
I recently attempted my first power sword, I guess it's kinda like your last one but uses the warm spectrum of red through orange, yellow to white. I think it came out okay for my first try.... yours seems like a much smoother blend though!
ReplyDeletei did lots of drybrushing. basicially layered a few electric blue brushes, then a few white ones (with shorter strokes each time) then washed the whole thing with blue wash to smooth it out. Then a final touch up with a bit of white again to tune up the edges.
ReplyDeleteThe more i think about it, the more "cold" it looks so i think the time as come for Captain Flame-ey Sword to get an upgrade.
It'll keep me busy till my Libby turns up in the post, at least.