Deciding your color patterns?

[DragonFaith]

Just asking out here. How'd you best plan and then implement your paint patterns and color schemes? At what point did you hand paint or use stencils?

 

[Electraknite]

like choosing color schemes? thats a personal preference but I'd say most people copy what their in-game spartan looks like. unless its a named character then the colors are decided for you. theres a few mash up spartans too that have unique color schemes based off anime characters. stencils get painted after the main color and before weathering. deciding what you want stenciled is totally up to you. find references for accurate in game stencils or paint literally whatever you want on it, like emblems, logos, pin-ups for example.

 

[Lupus590]

For planning out, if you have the experience then putting your armour into Blender and then texturing it is possibly a good way to try things. An easier way might be to take screenshots of your avatar in Armorsmith and then paint over it with Photoshop. If you don't have Armorsmith then in-game screenshots can also work, I would set my character to all white so that I have a clean base to work with.

 

[FalseShepherd]

I did some hand coloring in on photos (like Microsoft paint) to see what colors I liked but honestly I had my colors chosen early on. For painting, I only ever do stencils. I do not trust my hand to paint it by hand. I did get my wife to freehand one logo and it turned out great but that's just bc the stencil was so detailed that I couldn't get it on there cleanly.