From the Obscure 90's Minis File

[Jen]

I have no idea where the model is from, but it's kind of a neat one.

I quite like the color on his armor. Would you mind sharing what you used to achieve it?

 

Base color is RMS Fire Red (9004). I mixed that with Red Liner, and then used straight Red Liner, for shadows. For the highlights, I went Phoenix Red, Fire Orange, Marigold Yellow, Lemon Yellow, then hit the whole thing with a Clear Red glaze to smooth it back out.

 

 

That's an original Ram Python from Battlelords of the 23rd Century.

 

http://www.ssdc.com/store/original_series_ram_python

 

Wow, I am amazed the game is still around, even in a PDF-only form. I played a couple of the versions, back in the day.

 

Thanks for the comments, everyone!

[joshuaslater]

I bow to Brother Jim for knowing the answer to who made it, and the paint is awesome.

[Nameless]

 

• Sure, you need some shadow, but selling metal is all about the highlights.

I'd say NMM is all about the contrast.

[matsumoto]

That's an original Ram Python from Battlelords of the 23rd Century.

 

http://www.ssdc.com/store/original_series_ram_python

God, i hate that game!!!!!

 

and it's partly because of the Ram Python...it's a very well-kept secret, but the Ram Python is a subtle racist poke. They are generally a braindead combat machine sub-race of the Python people. i played Phentari, and had Python allies. While fighting the Cats, The Ram were essentialy fed to the slaughter to save our skins. I'm not gonna risk my ancient profile on what real-world parallels we discovered while playing, but they are there....

 

and they are VEILED, not right there for all to see. read some fluff, compare some pictures...

 

i also hated most race design...As Phentari octopus, i wanted eight tentacles, but got four and two legs instead.

Octopus with a gas mask = cool. Badly designed Octopus man.... not so cool.

 

overall, that game should stay history....just sayan.

 

 

fine paint job, despite my rant. i do admire your skill.

Edited March 14, 2013 by matsumoto

[Jen]

To me, if you were going for NMM on the armour, that doesn't look like metallic red. It looks like how armour that's been painted with a matte red paint would look because of the orange/yellow highlighting. Metallic red should go more towards pinks and whites on the highlights, i.e.

 

 

Fair enough. Unlike gray-ish metals, like steel, or golds, there aren't really a lit of actual red metals out there to work from. Even the car in that picture isn't red metal, it's glossy red paint, and what color it goes to in the highlights is probably going to depend on the pigments in the paint and the light it's under. So, if the armor doesn't look shiny, I'd guess it's because the highlights are too broad and/or not bright enough, not necessarily because of the color they are. Which wouldn't be surprising, I think I tend to make my shadows and highlights too broad in general, not just in NMM.

 

I got the color scheme for the armor from a mini I got in a class. I liked it, so I used it here in larger scale. Besides. He's a large lizard with a gun. Can't make him pink. ;)

 

I'd say NMM is all about the contrast.

 

Yes, that's true. I made that observation based on watching a couple people who are way better at this than me recently. What I saw was that they tended to go higher in the highlights than they went darker in the shadows. For instance, the highlight would go all the way to white, but the shadows would be maybe just a couple shades darker than the mid tone. I also noticed them using a darker mid tone, so overall, the difference between the 'color' of the metal and the shadow was less than the difference between the base metal color and the highlight. Which makes a certain amount of sense - arguably, the thing that's distinctive about shiny metal is the bright, specular highlights, and not so much the dark bits.

 

But that was also based off watching just a couple people, so it could also be just a stylistic thing or a couple preferred recipes, and I'm over-generalizing.

[smokingwreckage]

Kryomek USA also seem to be casting a "Ram Python".

[CashWiley]

there aren't really a lot of actual red metals out there to work from.

http://goo.gl/BW1AI

[Pingo]

 

there aren't really a lot of actual red metals out there to work from.

http://goo.gl/BW1AI

If you look at those excellent examples CashWiley linked to, you can see that although the metals are red, and their highlights work up in red, the actual points of the highest highlight are white, not red or orange or yellow.

 

This is true of colored metals and of glass both. However intense the color, unless there is a colored filter or film of some kind on the surface (or the light source itself is colored), the very highest light, those little points (were they called specular? good word) are white.

 

I have not yet essayed NMM, so maybe I'm just being an annoying armchair general.

[ObsidianCrane]

Its true of all colours, and not just for metal. The brightest highlights are always white, but we don't always paint to the brightest highlight. However for NMM you want a white highlight.

 

Red is such a hard colour to paint simply because it is hard to get successively brighter reds without it becoming orange or pink. This gets even harder when you want a bright red anyway, darker reds are much easier to paint.

[Pingo]

Ahh, zer good old days when we used toxic heavy metal cadmium reds!!! which had such a loverly bright red color and perfect opacity.

 

What on earth were we thinking?