Saturday, January 28, 2012

Colour Scheme for Ghost Knights?

Having assembled a few Ghost Knight terminators for use with a Mordrak Grey Knights army that I'm building, I wanted to start to consider what colour schemes might be appropriate for painting the ghosts with.  I noticed that a number of Ghost Knight images on the web tended to focus on greens and blues as the main hues.  The major inspiration for these colours would appear to come directly from the army of the dead (Lord of the Rings).  The image above shows such a colour scheme.  Although the transparency is not really a viable option (I wish!), the general blue and/or green hue could be something cool to aim to emulate.  I think I'm leaning more toward a pale blue colour than the green hues to be honest (the green makes me think more of a sickly cursed knight than a Mordrak ghost knight to be honest, but opinions welcome!).

The second point is whether to go for an all-ghostly colour scheme.  By that, I mean should the Ghost Knights be a complete ghostly colour everywhere (whether that's green or blue biased), or perhaps should there be some of the original colours showing through in various regions?  One alternative option might be to have only some set portions of the armour in the ghostly colours -- specifically the lettered portions on the shoulder pads (and elsewhere) to give an ethereal "inner glow" approach.  

The weapons are another area that I don't know how to approach.  Should they be "powered" like some other power weapons (e.g. see these terminator's power weapons), or should they be in the same colours as the "ghost" portions of the miniature?  Your thoughts welcome!

[image from Lord of the Rings motion pictures; posted here in accordance with "fair use" guidelines as a reference material]

3 comments:

Farmpunk said...

I'd go off-white with blue-green drybrushing, maybe with a little bit of metallic media (from Vallejo) to give a shimmer to it.

maybe wash the white model with a blue, and drybrush on a metallic green

Spaguatyrine said...

I like the idea of a green tint. I am not an expert of color so don't know how to get it there.

Menzies Tank said...

Hmm.. A tough question!

I painted mine white, washed them with enchanted blue circa 3-4 times, then proceeded to pick out and highlight areas in white in a 'random' fashion to make them seem more 'ghosty', as I found from other examples that highlighting them consistently and in an even fashion, you have the danger of having the Ghost Knights looking more like 'statues' than spectres.

Also what to do with the weapons is tricky. Again if you painted the weapons just like the ghosts and again if you give it consistent shading, it may end up looking 'statuesque' as well which may or may not be a good thing.

For me, I ended up using the same 'Force weapon' pattern I've been applying to the rest of my GK army to tie them in as a consistent unit, and thankfully the blue colour scheme matches very well as the rest of my army also use hues of blue to demonstrate psychic powers. I had considered using the green LOTR scheme, but as it didn't match the rest of my army and I had concerns that green could look a little too 'sickly', I opted for blue instead.

At the end of the day I would say experiment and see what you feel suits you the best! Looking forward to seeing the end result!

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