Using Photoshop to Test Color/Conversion Ideas

     Hi everyone! It has been quite a while. I'm just about to go into my finals week (I blame school for my lack of posting) so hopefully I'll find some time to update the blog with what I've been doing over the past month. Today I'm just going to give you all some examples of how I use photoshop to help decide what type of color schemes, or even conversions would look good on particular models.  More below...
  The Land Raider above was a fun one to make. I seriously doubt that I will ever build this, but it was just a fun Idea for a Baal pattern Land Raider for an apocalypse game. 2 flamestorm cannon sponsons, and an Inferno cannon turret (The one with "torrent" from codex IG) on the top. maybe even trade that storm bolter for a heavy flamer if you really want to go over the top.

This picture was one of the first I did for my land raider. I just found a suitable image on google and changed the colors here and there until I found a scheme I liked. Even if you have just a little photoshop experience this can work since it is just a quick and dirty type thing, and it doesn't have to look super pretty, it just has to give you an idea of what it will be like.

 

                                                                                             Here I wanted to see what robes would look like on my terminators, so I changed the original green robes on the left to the red robes on the left to match my army.

     I really don't like the idea of having a bright blue librarian in the middle of my black and red army, so I tested out a few different colors on the librarian as well.

  

     I thought that it might be cool to have silver Sanguinary Guard, so I made up this one real quick. It doesn't look to bad.

     Another fun Idea for a conversion. Replacing the terminator chaplain's crozius arcanum with the apothecary's arm from the new Deathwing box (which I really want to get someday). This was a very easy photoshop job since the GW photos were from the exact same angle, so everything lined up nicely. If/when I actually do this conversion I will also switch his storm bolter for a power axe also.

     And to finish it off, we have some photoshop jobs I did to try to decide on a paint scheme for my Chaos marines (spoiler alert, I still haven't decided, but I'm leaning toward the red).

     Well that's it for now. Any of you with the photoshop skills already, you should definitely give this a try. It is much nicer to realize that you don't like a color scheme on photoshop than to spend hours on painting a model only to have to strip it and start over. And for those of you who don't know your way around photoshop, I will probably be making a tutorial on how I do this. It really isn't all that hard to do, and doesn't take much time either.
     Thanks for reading, and hope you learned something you find useful!