Monday, June 20, 2016

Chaos Renegades...Line Art

Hi all,

No new figures for you today but a follow up to the last Renegade I posted...#9...and a discussion of the line art drawings used in the Realms of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness to represent Chaos Marines.

 As I have committed (perhaps foolishly) to the painting challenge over on the Herohammer International FaceBook group I have spent a lot of time looking at the army lists for Chaos Space Marines that are presented in the back of RoC: Slaves to Darkness.  This tome contains army lists for several of the famous space marine Chapters that went rogue during the Horus Heresy...and these army lists are illustrated with line art drawing that are very similiar to their fantasy counterparts in the Warhammer Armies book.  I really enjoy looking at these drawing and quickly realized that many of them are drawings of actual figures from the Renegades range.

Here are a few examples of the art work with their corresponding figures (there are many more examples of this)





There is even a line art drawing of one of the figures that I had already painted...

It was actually this image that got me to thinking that there might be an interesting use for these line drawings.  I thought it sure would be cool to color the drawing to look like my figure....but that led to another thought...

Why not reverse that idea and use the drawings that are based directly off of actual figures as "testers" for different color schemes? 

Obviously one option here would be to print out these line art drawings and make an adult coloring book of them (which is all the rage these days with the hippsters) ...but I'm a lazy man so I opted to save them as individual image files that I could color digitally.

For example lets take this figure (Renegade #9) and its corresponding line art drawing.






I first cleaned up the Line art drawing from the .pdf of the book page and made a .jpg of it.

I then took that image into PhotoShop and messed around with colors for various parts of the figure to settle on a color scheme that I liked.  I wasn't attempting to make these images look too realistic...the idea here was just to choose colors and where to place them...so to speed up the process I used the Bucket Fill tool to quickly color segments of the drawing.  I'm sure that a really taltended and patient digital artist could make these shine...but that wasn't my goal.




Here are some examples of different colors that I attempted with this figure.

As you have probably noticed by now...it was this last image that I chose to use as the template for Chaos Renegade #9...which looked like this when translated to the lead.


I found this to be a very fun exercise and certainly plan on doing it with other renegades that have both figures and line art to work with. It certainly helped me think through my color choices and their placement in a way I hadn't before.  It also gave me the space to make mistakes and try weird combos without having to repaint a figure over and over again...

I'm my next post we will look a little further into this line art pieces and how they can inspire additional work with these fantastic figures.

Cheers,

Blue





9 comments:

  1. I like the green one to! Now you have an excuse to buy another one!! :)

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    1. I'm fairly confident that you'll see those colors on another figure...cause I like it too...:)

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  2. Great idea and great post. Love what you did with the line drawings.

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  3. You know, they did this years ago for Space Marines, but in which GW publication and when I simply cannot for the life of me remember.....

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  4. Great idea. I saw this done on a picture of a either bare or primed figure once too. I think it was Carmen's fun painty time.

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  5. I've seen a few others use this technique a couple of times in the past Blue, but they really went to town on the shading, which you previously mentioned wasn't your intent. I agree, just applying block colours is more than adequate as a painting aid.

    Actually, come to think of it, Brian over on Robeasts blog had a picture of a Bullock jet bike colourised. That was what actually inspired me to try and make one from scratch! So yeah, a very cool hobby aid indeed :)

    Oh, and those line drawings are a favourite of mine too Blue. Your obviously a man of good taste!

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  6. Woow, really cool! Show us them all in colour!

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