Color Question: Eldar

by SandWyrm

Hey blog-o-awesomeness,

My name is George and I am a soldier currently deployed over in Afghanistan, but will soon be returning home to my addiction of plastic men after three months away. While deployed I have had the fortunate luxury of the internet and came across your color theory threads and I was blown away by the absolute amazing series of articles. I have been painting for most of my time in the hobby and just recently started to game at a competitive level. I attended adepticon this last year with my guard and because it was my first time I didn’t try to go all out with an amazing army display or competitive list, just really to have fun. Now that the mighty adepticon is upon us again I am planning a beautiful eldar army and will be going all out and pulling all the strings I can to get a great presentation for everyone to see.


I am basing my color scheme off of Anthony Erdelji using analogous colors of purple and cyan. I am pretty much going to use their color scheme verbatim, but there are a couple colors I am not sure about. Since most of the focal point of the army will be the serpent platforms I will be putting most of my effort into them.



The only question I really have is about the crystals. Going back to my amazement of your article, the purples and cyans are great analogous colors, but would green be the good choice for the stones? I feel if they just stayed in the cyan range it would work really well and would simplify the color palette a lot. 

The colors that Anthony is using on his Serpent are actually Magenta and Cyan. Calling those colors "Analogous" is a bit of a stretch.

Here they are charted out:

If I go across the wheel to find a complement to this range (Yellow), I'll end up with a triad.

There's nothing wrong with using a triad. But let's call it what it is. :)

So personally, I'd either paint the stones yellow, as that will complete the triad. Or I'd paint them green, as that is the complement of the magenta he uses on his hulls.

Tony himself is using more of a bent split-complement. As his magenta is being contrasted with a range of green to cyan, with a little yellow thrown in on the crystal.

 Now I will have dire avengers and fire dragons as my infantry and there was another question for a color decision here as well.


These were the guardians that he completed and again with great purples and cyans, but what stands out and catches my eye (imo) in a bad way are the yellow bands and again the gems crystals. I will say cyan for the gems and was thinking maybe using the blue-grey or a white for the bands. I am just not feeling the yellow mixing well with the rest of the colors. As for the dire avengers I plan to use the cyan for the crests they adorn.

Yellow completes the triad. Personally I think it looks quite nice. but it's too isolated on Tony's figs. See this article I did on color isolation for how to fix it.

So just a few questions with a long write-up and hope you did not mind all the reading, but after your amazing article I just felt you would be the ones to ask. Hope for the best for you guys and to hear from you soon.


George

Hope this helps. Sorry for the delay in responding.