How do you do an engine glow? I have an airbrush, but when I did engine glow on my Deci, it didn't quite work out...

58 minutes ago, Darth Drago said:

How do you do an engine glow? I have an airbrush, but when I did engine glow on my Deci, it didn't quite work out...

Post pics, we'll be better able to help with some.

In general, the thing to remember about glow effects is that the light source itself is the brightest thing. It's best to make the core of the engine actually white or as close as you can to it, and progressively shade down into darker colours as you go outwards.

And watch out for overspray, as I found to my peril on my Deci

I don't have an airbrush, but this is how I do it:

You are going to do some wet blending which is basically the technique of painting on top of wet paint with a brush.

You're going to use 3 colors in a concentric pattern like a target you shoot arrows at (but the shape is dictated by the engine). Use a fine tipped brush.

1. Paint the inside of the engine nozzle (if there is one) your main color, a blue, for instance.
2. Next you'll paint a tint of your main color in a smaller "ring"
   - a tint is just another way of saying "adding white" to a color". In this case a 1:`1 or 1:2 of color to white should work for you.
3. Finally, paint and even smaller ring in the center in white, or if you like mixing colors, nearly white. A 1:5 or greater ratio should work.

Remember you are painting wet onto wet, so there may be a little globbiness, which is okay. When you apply the second and third color you want to push the first layer of paint just a touch with the second so the edges begin to bleed into one another. Then repeat with the third color.

Practice on the head of a nail, or similar.

If you have an airbrush, this is where you'd do a light spray of the area to imply the light from the engine spilling onto the nearby surfaces for that glowing effect.

If you don't have an airbrush you can try and mimic the effect by doing a dry brush technique. It's a matter of preference, and to me it doesn't matter.

Here are some examples from my ships. I'm not going to win any painting awards, but they look good enough for my needs.

Good luck!

For some reason I can't do the big engines as the Decimator's or Falcon's. If you have no honor and no ethics, like me, you can use a cheap and easy-to-find-on-eBay decals for that ships. Smaller engines are more friendly to paint as Majeure has explained.

Extremely helpful!

Here are the pics...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2TTFIZFT8bIMmJQaXNnMnNvZHM/view?usp=sharing

Looks decent to me. Thin your paints though.

The next stage would be to get the airbrush out, set it to a very fine spray, and spray some pinkish red around the engines.

https://imgur.com/jj9RXmI

I used a blue Expo on my Deci and it was a little dull but still came out good.

Blue Expo... Does that mean a dry erase marker?

Another similar question.

How do you fade paints?

Example: Energy claws for games like Warhammer.

I'm going to try to make my SV look like it's made of glowing energy, and I need to know how to fade blue into white.

With a regular brush, lots of thing layers, of paint changing colour as you go.

With an airbrush, broadly the same but doing the fades and layers is a little easier.

You can also use wet blending to get this effect. There are good videos on youtube if you do some googling (I'd link but the best ones are done by other game manufacturers, so in deference to our hosts etc etc).