DOUBLE RAINBOW!!!

What does it mean?! We here at TSE are constantly striving to take our painting to the next level. Well, okay, to be fair we're constantly striving to take our GAME to the next level, but personally I know the only factor I have any realistic chance of improving is painting, so there's your honesty for the week.

One of the blogs I frequent is The Painting Corps. If you take a few moments to visit you won't be disappointed. They offer extremely good tips, tutorials, videos, and discussions on everything from putting your models together to making them look awesome either on the table or for competition. Their Friday Quick Tip alone is worth a click, and this week the tip was so fantastically useful I just had to share it.

The tip dealt with the simple but often overlooked tool: The color wheel. Now we all know what a color wheel is (assuming we took art class in elementary school), and most of us probably have at least a basic understanding of how it works (primary, secondary, complementary colors, etc.). The Corpsmen offered a link to a tool I will find endlessly useful, easy to use, and kinda fun to play with.

You can find it here. It's called "Color Scheme Designer 3" and it's full of win. Say you're about to start a new army. You can do like Chosen1 and prime some test models, slap down a basecoat of a given color, get frustrated, set them on my desk and wait for the paint elf to work his magic, still not like the way it looks, strip said test models in Simple Green, prime and repeat until you find a scheme that works.

OR...

You can go to the link above, select any shade on the color wheel, and see shades, highlights, complementary colors, triads (three colors that work together), tetrads (harmony based on four colors), and more. With a few clicks (literally) you can try out as many complete color schemes as you want and not lift a brush. Once you've found your scheme you can even export it to XML or text (in the customary numerical format that HTML uses to translate colors) so you can reference it easily later. If the color wheel doesn't have the exact color you want, don't fret. Just use the Hue Adjuster to alter a color that's close and BAM!

Check it out and don't forget to show Grey_Death and the rest of The Painting Corps some love. Happy painting!