My Desktop and Thoughts on Saturation

This is my last week before courses start and I have no idea how much painting I will get done this fall. I hope that I can dedicate at least one night per week to some serious painting and have about 30 minutes of painters per day. I feel it's important to paint something everyday. Keeps you in shape.

The other night I picked out this model from my incredibly large and ridiculous stash of metal XV-15 stealth suits. It's really kind of insane. I collected close to 30 of these guys on the cheap in hopes of one day making a Black Ops Tau army...alas that has not yet come to pass.

I was a bit sloppy and just wanted some miniature to relax with. No pressure for making it look amazing, perfect or whatever. Just as an exercise.

I played around with the greys a bit. I added a red-brown to the grey and then highlighted up by adding mostly white, but also small amounts of blue. 

The green glowing parts are the old, now out of production Scorpion Green. I love that color. It's so vibrant. To compliment that I painted on some red marking to his armor plates. 

These days my daughter is really interested in painting my "vojaciky," which is Slovak language for "little soldiers." I've had her try her hand at some old space marines and I really see some potential in the future. I want my daughter to be the next Natalia Melnik! Though at the moment she is mostly interested in painting everything pink. 

I saw Elysium last weekend. While not as solid and re-watchable as District 9, I really enjoyed it. Sometimes I feel that movies tell us too much. For example, they have those captions telling you what things are. I think Elysium starts with captions telling us that Earth is a degraded, dirty and polluted world for the poor only. Rich folks all moved to Elysium, etc. But...I feel like that was obvious and could have been told by simply showing us...not by writing it out in captions. 

Additionally, the movie could have also ended about 5 minutes earlier. They showed us this bug happy ending. I felt it chipped away at the suspension of disbelief. I mean...the movie seemed so real all up to that point, why ruin it with a big hollywood ending? Why not let us draw our own conclusions about the impact of what the hero did? 

For most part Elysium looked realistic. 

It got me thinking about colors and how you can use them to convey realism. Lots of the camera work in Elysium was desaturated, even when they were up on that space station. It made you imagine that this could really happen - it looked real. We can do that on our models by controlling saturation. Any color can be desaturated by the addition of grey. Sometimes it isn't appropriate. Like sometimes you want the clothing and armor to be desaturated, but you want some glowy bits vibrant or you want the face to really stand out so you beef up the saturation. For example on my stealth suit above - he's mostly desaturated but I have given him vibrant green glowing buttons. Neat eh?

I think this is why the new Space Marine Centurians look so silly to people. The only images we've been able to see so far have been highly saturated versions. Bright yellow and bright blue. All that vibrancy looks toy-ish, unreal. 

Well, that's just a thought.