The Kabal of the Golden Rose - colours scheme test models

Since the beginning of my journey in the dark alleys of Commorragh I decided that I will paint my Dark Eldar following a custom paint scheme because I don't like very much the "put hard-edge highlights everywhere" ones found in the Codex.

But I also liked since the beginning the fluff behind the Kabal of the Obsidian Rose as it is full of treachery, deception and state-of-the-art weapons, three things that a self-respected Dark Eldar live for!

To put two and two together I decided that my Kabal will be an elite portion of the Obsidian Rose, with more treachery, more deceptions, more state-of-the-art weapons and it's own colours scheme and today, after months of thinking this over, I started to paint three test models from my Kabal.

I decided to use two Whyces and one Incubus because in this models you could find most of the common elements present in other Dark Eldar models: armour, the Wych suit, skin and weapons that ranges from metal swords to pistols and rifles

When I designed my colour scheme I put down the following key points:

• the armour must be of a golden colour
• the under armour / Wytch suit must be dark, possibly a gradient from black to another colour; it must not be a single solid colour
• I wanted to use purple somewhere, because I like purple!

Starting from here I came up with a colour scheme based on green, yellow, purple and red

After assembling the three models and filling gaps and holes I primed them with Vallejo Acrylic - Polyurethane German Panzer Grey Primer using my airbrush. I used my new Iwata Revolution Mini HP-M2 that I reviewed here. I used German Panzer Grey instead of Black so I could actually shade it with a darker colour.

When the primer was dry I put down the green gradient on the suit:

I created the gradient using the following colours in succession:

• Formula P3 Coal Black from Privateer Press : it's a dark blue / green that work very well as first highlight for black
• Game Color Scurvy Green from Vallejo : one of the best green colours around (at least for me!) and one of the main colours of my scheme
• Game Color Jade Green from Vallejo : the mid tone green in the Scurvy / Jade / Foul green combination
• Game Color Foul Green from Vallejo

With the green pretty much done I started working on the gold parts. I used paints from the Vallejo Liquid Gold range: this are metallic paints that actually contains real metallic particles instead of the crystalline mika flakes found in the common acrylics metal paints. Because they contains metallic particles they use isopropyl alcohol instead of water to avoid rusting and so they should be thinned with isopropyl alcohol

The armour fist layer was done with a couple of thin coats of Red Gold witch, as the name imply, is a reddish gold:

I then highlighted it with thinned down Old Gold, a yellow-white gold:

Next, I put a mix of Old Gold and White Gold (guess what? an almost white gold!) in the more exposed areas:

Finally I used pure White Gold (thinned down of course) as an extreme highlight. You could see the end results (for now) in the following pictures: