238: Painting lava on the Avatar

Amazingly enough, the Avatar is one of the most popular posts on the blog, and its a model I'm really keen to get painted so its first up on my list for the new year.

I've never painted anything like lava before so I needed to test out some effects to see what would work.  What you see below is an attempt to recreate the classic lava look you'll find by simply searching on google.  One thing I've realised is that the areas that are going to be lava-like on this model are a lot larger than on the GW and Forgeworld avatar models.

To stop the whole model looking like some kind of weird bee, I'll be trying to make the molten sections darker, as if they are partially solidified on the surface.

Unlike the usual techniques of starting with a dark base, and working up to a lighter top layer simulating light shining, this starts with a light base, and works down to a darker top layer.

After blocking in the areas in white, I laid down a strong yellow base.  For the deepest recesses I then went back and added a little white to act as the hottest colour point on the models.

I meant to take photos of the next phases, but I kind of got into a zone and was mixing colours on the fly so the next shot is the "finished" result.

From the yellow, I then applied an overbrush of Fiery Orange, then a lighter overbrush of Red Gore.  From here, I started adding in increasing amounts of black to the mix and applying lighter and lighter overbrushing till it was effectively a very light drybrush.  While doing this I deliberately tried to get a little of the colours onto the surrounding black areas to represent the glow, much like for an OSL effect.

At the end, I had to go back and re-fill the yellow and then the white into the deepest recesses as those areas had been somewhat lost in the process.

I'm relatively happy with the result, but its only over a small area, so next will be to scale it up to the larger areas.  First though, if there are any comments from those of you reading this, I'd be really interested to hear what you think and if there's any tips you can give.

Thanks for looking in.

Andrew