Chaos Marines and Object Source Lighting

 I've been painting another old model from the box of metal miniatures. This time, it's a really old Khorne berserker marine that my friend Owen gave me. I think he's a World Eater - or, in the immortal words of the former Warhammer metal band Bolt Thrower, a WURRRRLLD EEEETAHHH. Sooner or later, every miniatures blog mentions Bolt Thrower.

As with so many of these old metal models, the detail was rather soft and the model is pretty small, but it was a real pleasure to paint. There's something about the extreme detail and very sharp edges of modern plastic sculpts that puts me off a bit. It's probably that I find all the extra stuff daunting rather than anything aesthetic, though. Laziness rather than art.

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Anyway, my friend James P suggested that I should have a go at doing some "special effects" on some miniatures. I thought I'd start with Object Source Lighting (OSL). I fished out some chaos marines I painted a while back and tried to make their plasma guns glow. 

These two guys (who are basically the same model with a head-swap) have come out reasonably well for a first go. The OSL was done with a mixture of careful drybrushing and mixing blue into the existing colours.

The third model was a bit harder as, realistically, the glow from his gun probably wouldn't reach much of his body. I tried to reflect that by not doing too much, but it looks a bit half-hearted. 

This is really just a warm-up, because I bought a sprue of female wizards for Frostgrave (excellent sprue, by the way), and I'm going to have a go at a much grander lighting effect on one of them. But that's (probably) for next time.