How to Paint a Magic Sphere?

[Blue in vt]

Alright...I've bumped up a against a painting challenge that is getting the best of me.

One of my LPL teams has a wizard who is holding a Magic Globe or Sphere in his one hand.  I would like this object to be a fairly bright color...Orange or Red....but to appear clear...But its not working out!!!

So I've been looking at tutorials on how to paint gems and lens ect....but these are effectively 2d objects....not complete Spheres...and I'm having a hard time translating that info onto a globe.

Can anyone point me toward a discussion of painting spheres of this type...or toward examples of well done ones?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Blue

[Faber]

hey Chris, I've found only this one



Not bad...there was a nice article on the GW website called "Wizard Painting Challenge" or something similar with some better examples but I cannot find it 

[Blue in vt]

ooohhhh...that one look pretty sweet.  Some Gloss varnish will certainly be in order.

thanks.

Blue

[Faber]

I think that using lots of gloss varnish layers you can obtain a nice effect. Try to search something about marmor painting...I think it could be useful 
Good luck!

[Golgotha]

Might I suggest the following?

Choose an external direction of a light source - paint the part of the sphere facing this imaginary light source light and the opposite end dark - by light and dark I mean in terms of the shade of whatever colour it is your using and then give a liberal coat of gloss varnish. Treat the 3d sphere as though it was 2d in terms of painting.

YouTube has several videos and painting spheres you may want to watch a few of those - see for example

 

which while not great gives the basic idea. Hope this helps - keen to see the results - the whole GW gem thing can look overdone and consequently not realistic so with any dots or stars of light keep them subtle for best results. There red ink however painted on a white surface can work well especially in trying to create a translucent effect.

[Westfalia Chris]

I'd support Golgotha's suggestion in that in my experience, it works best to pick a general viewing angle for the figure, i.e. front or back, and place the "lightest reflections" accordingly. Here's an orb I did a couple of months back, which I am quite happy with:



As you can see, I painted the orb in subsequently lighter shades from top to bottom. The bottommost layer, which touches the goblin's skin, is almost pure orange, but all the shades have some of the red inside. Imagine painting rings running around the orb in a horizontal fashion.

The top pin light is painted in pure white placed within the most likely viewing angle, and the whole affair got three slightly thinned coats of artists' acrylic varnish to top it off. The whole orb took me about an hour in total, with most of the time spent painting other areas while the individual layers dried.

[Golgotha]

Spot on Westfalia - lovely looking orb and great mini too. Looks like him and I have a few things in common as I too have on occasion had to retrieve my lost marbles. 

[Faber]

Well done with that orb Chris! 
Your modus operandi sounds really good to me. I'll try it for sure when I'll have the chance
Thanks for sharing!

[Faber]

Sorry for the threadomancy but I finally have the chance to paint a magical sphere and I'd really like to say thanks to Blue for opening a thread about and to WestfaliaChris for the painting recipe
here's my result:



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not the best pic but I'll take a better one sooner or later