The demi and ace pride flags use mostly the same palette; white, black, (grey,) purple. There’s going to be some synthwave influence, some flying engine OSL that’s not part of that flag, but fuck it, long as I’m happy with it, right? The DAO skirmish team I’ve got set up has a single stealth suit, but my 1k and 2k lists both have 3 stealth suits and an elite battlesuit with flying and ambush and close-range buffs, so the four models together represent a single paint scheme and also my deep strike team that should chew through anything less than about 500 points in the back line. Anyway, who cares about the meta, let’s paint some dark monochrome with really bright colour on top.
First, assembly. As ever, models from PiperMakes. These are the GhostShrimp models and the Commander Frame (with magnetized weapons because my 1k and 2k lists have different weapons and I like WYSIWYG if I can manage it). Some airbrush and white oil paint gets me the basis for that delicious internal glow.
Purple from the demi/ace flags for the stealth glow, which along with the white panels and grey panel lining rounds out the pride palette. The same turquoise eyes the infantry have because I really like the colour (and hey, keeping some colour cohesion across the army). Yellow/orange engine glow (which happily matches my grunt leader’s cape). The colour pops partly because it’s in a sea of black and partly because I’m pushing the contrast with techniques I took from elminiaturista.
The Commander Frame has no stealth effect, so I added a touch of purple on the computer controls it’s floating over. On the other hand it’s got *loads* of opportunities for OSL glows, which I implemented I think pretty okay. It’s imperfect, maybe. Could use some brighter edges, but I think I’ve dialed in the shadows properly that really help sell the “directional light” effect. I need to touch up the wing orbs for shadow- and probably glue them on flexible mounts so they stop snapping. Anyway, I’ve improved my OSL thanks to watching elminiaturista and I’m happy about that.
With these models finished, I have 1000 points of OPR DAO Union. My goal was 300 points for skirmish games, but since the 16 infantry models all had the same scheme and I’ve learned my lesson about batch painting, and all my flying-ambush models had the same scheme, I ended up doing extra models for marginally more effort and saving myself a couple weeks of painting time.
