From the Drydock: Ryushi Fleet Forming or Why Red is the Most Whorish Colour

Finally! A Red I Can Live With!

Ahh red. I both love and hate you. You make me look like Santa Claus if I try to wear you, but in oxbloods or burgundy you are one of the tastiest of colours to behold in all of your richness.

You are also a whore of a colour to paint you illusive fucker. Why? Because like the Princess and the Pea you need your base colours to be just right and need a gradual shading up to the eventual colour that I want you to be.

To date I have avoided painting you like the plague, which has led to a sizeable French aircore fleet not getting painted and a decided preponderance of blues, purples and greens in my colour palate for painting projects to date. Dare I say a rather tired cool colour palate these days...

But alas, I have conquered you, perhaps even seduced you into my repertoire of favourite colours.

Potentially creepy metaphors aside, like many painters, I've hated painting red ever since I decided to base something black and then glom some variation of red overtop of it with disastrous results.

Enter my new Ryushi fleet, which I'll be fielding (against all evidence that I really should take my Aquans because they fucking rule in the new Firestorm 2.0 rules) in the Out of the Basement tournament at the end of the month. I chose this fleet because I just LOVE that deep red colour offset by that Tron-like blue. I'm hoping I'll have time to play a little bit with some OSL (object source lighting) effects in the blue areas. I think it could look totally awesome. But I've also got quite the painting schedule to stick to, so we shall see. Still, if I could manage an easy OSL effect with my paintbrush and a nice basing scheme I think I could easily compete for best painted fleet.

Anyhow, so with the base colour done and drybrushed and inked this morning, I can move onto detail colours and that electric blue I'm talking about. I'll be tackling that tomorrow morning. LOVE the battle carrier and it's "Hot Tub" flight deck as Jordan puts it. ;)

The YouTube video is by Dr. Faust at the Painting Clinic. This guy is the bomb and a staple subscribe to your YouTube channel for all manner of non-airbrush painting techniques.