Hey everybody, today I'm going to talk about something I've been having a lot of fun with recently and that is fluorescent paints. For a while now, I've been using the brightest colors I could find for Marvel: Crisis Protocol spell effects, but they never really popped how I wanted them to. At Adepticon 2024, I picked up the Neon Colors pack from AK Interactive and have been playing around with them over the last year, so far with good results.
But I wanted more.
This year at Adepticon, I made it my mission to hunt down more fluorescent colors or other options for cranking up luminosity in my paint jobs. I picked up a set of AK Interactive's fluorescent inks and another set of their fluorescent paint, just to have some spare.
But I wanted more.
I was on the look out for other colors, the neon pack from AK is a good batch of colors and I've even mixed them together to make other colors as needed. But I really wanted other options for purple and other maybe a different red.
After scouring the vendor hall, I happened upon a vendor called Lethal Shadows and they had a nice selection of fluorescent colors, including a very vibrant pink, purple and others. I decided to grab a few to try out and picked up Telemagenta, Fluor Violet, Fluor Red, Fluor Orange, Fluor Yellow and Fluor Green.
Once I was back from Adepticon, I started playing around with things. I grabbed the Telemagenta and reworked Jean Grey's spell effect. I did a full repaint of it and it turned out really cool and seems really promising. Its super vibrant in normal light and under black lights it absolutely shines!
Next up, I started working on Mephisto and used the AK inks to fill the cracks in his base with fire colors. I then used the inks on Ultron, Metal Tyrant's glowing areas as well and both of them had good results. But I didn't do anything with their flames/explosions, panting them how I normally would. This posed an interesting question. Do I paint flames with fluorescent colors too? It was worth a test.
I found an fire elemental in my miniatures collection and primed it with white. I then painted the entire model with a mixture of ink and my standard paint colors, because you can supposedly add the inks to your acrylic paint to boost luminosity. The ink also acted as a thinning agent, which made it harder to control. Most of the paint pooled in the recesses and while it looks good in regular lighting, I'm not completely sold on the effect under black light yet.
Since the paint pooled in the recesses and left the high points with thin layers it looks strange at the moment. Part of the problem is that I can't see what I'm doing while painting under normal lighting and holding a led flashlight in my mouth isn't a viable option.
After testing the elemental, I started working on Supergiant's space magic and used Fluorescent Magenta ink as a basecoat and then added Fluorescent Blue on the flame spikes. I tried to blend the two together as best I could and from there I used inks, Telemagenta, Fluorescent Blue paint and even some pastels to highlight it up. Overall it worked out really well and I'm happy with the results.
Using the fluorescent inks as a basecoat seemed to help on Supergiant's spell effect, that might be the solution for flames as well. But, I still couldn't see what was happening with the blends as I worked. This led me to buying a UV desk lamp for my hobby area.
This small lamp is basically an larger led flashlight on a gooseneck, so I can position it where ever I need it to be. So far it seems to work well and I can have this lamp on along with my other desk lamps too. The fluorescent colors shine under the UV light allowing me to see what is happening and I can have my normal lights on too, so I can see what else I am doing too. Plus it allows me to slide the miniature under each type of light in real time and see how it looks in both situations.
I'm excited to see where this goes. I want to get the best results possible, not only for Crisis Protocol, but I also have a bunch of Cyberpunk Combat Zone miniatures to paint up - including the figures based on the Edgerunners anime. It's going to be a lot of fun playing with this!
I'll post more about this as I work on new things.