17/04/2020 Tutorial: Object Source Lighting (OSL) and Other Lighting Effects – Light Miniatures

L I G H T M I N I AT U R E S

Never be afraid to paint outside the lines

Tutorial: Object Source Lighting (OSL) and

Other Lighting Effects
DECEMBER 3, 2017 / DAVID / 31 COMMENTS

One of my favorite effects in miniature painting is when the artist uses paint to create the illusion of a
light source which is not actually there. These lighting effects can be extremely fun and eye-catching,
but they can also be very tricky to pull off. In this tutorial I will outline a set of rules which, when
followed, will make your depictions of light sources much more believable and impactful. I will also

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show a step-by-step painting process which is one way you can follow these rules and achieve a good
result.

A quick note on terminology and history.

Object-source lighting, or OSL, refers to when one of the light sources depicted by your
painting is an actual object on the gure or its base, such as a torch, lamp, or glowing
sword. Lighting e ects is a more general term I use to cover any use of paint to suggest a
light source which is present in the scene, but may be “o camera” rather than being
depicted on the miniature.

The miniature painting community was introduced to OSL by Slayer-Sword-winning painter

Victoria Lamb, whose creations The Rescue of Sister Joan and Firey Angel are two of the
best examples of this e ect.

To the extent that miniature painting is a genre of art, there are no hard-and-fast rules. However, when
painting a miniature to simulate the behavior of a light source, you are trying to create an illusion of
something which is not really there—the light that you imagine being cast on your miniature, from an
object it is holding or from its environment. In order to create a convincing illusion, you must follow
the same physical laws that govern how light behaves, or you risk spoiling the illusion because
something will look “off” to the viewer. These rules about how light behaves are part of how you
understand the world, but are often instinctive and subconscious. By taking these rules and making
them explicit, it becomes easier to see when a lighting-effect illusion is not working, understand why it
is not working, and x it.

Rules of light physics

1. The Cardinal Rule of OSL: lit areas always appear brighter than surrounding unlit areas.
2. Lit areas appear no brighter than the light source they are lit by.
3. The apparent color of an object is affected by both the color of the object itself and the color of
the light falling on it.
4. Light moves in straight lines.
5. The strength of the light diminishes with distance from the object.

Rules 1-3 are the ones that people get wrong most often. I normally see people getting rules 4 and 5
right, or if they violate them they seem to have sensible reasons.

Rule 1, the Cardinal Rule of OSL: lit areas always appear brighter than surrounding unlit areas. This
is the most important rule, but is also the rule I see violated most frequently when portraying colored
light sources, which is why I have chosen to call it the cardinal rule of OSL. Very frequently I see people
represent a yellow light source by painting the entire miniature as if the light source were not casting
any light at all, and then glazing the areas around the light source with a thin translucent layer of
yellow paint. This violates the cardinal rule of OSL, since the glazed areas are no lighter than the areas
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around them, and in fact are usually darker. And while the effect is not spoiled too much when
people use yellow for this, it is completely destroyed when people choose a darker color for the light
source, like green, red, or purple. If you are going to use the glazing approach (which can be a good
one), it is important to highlight the areas where the light will fall before you glaze them.

Rule 2: Lit areas appear no brighter than the light source they are lit by. This rule most commonly
gives people trouble when painting light sources which are red or purple, since saturated purple and
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red colors appear darker in value compared with other hues. If you are trying to simulate something
like a red or purple neon sign or lightsaber, you are in a bit of a bind, since neon signs are themselves
very saturated and also put out a lot of light. One way of resolving this is taking a cue from how photos
of neon often appear, where the tube itself is a very light orange, pink, or white, but all of the re ected
light has the characteristic neon red-orange color.

Of course this only works if there are surrounding areas to re ect the light. If the lightsaber is held away from
the mini where there’s nothing to re ect the light, it will just look white.

This doesn’t mean that the entire light source must be brighter than the light it casts, just the brightest
part. If your light source is a re, parts of the re can be a dark orange, red, or even black for the
smoke, but the brightest part should be white.

Even though this is art, which allows you a certain license to break rules, in my experience
breaking either rule 1 or rule 2 is a very bad idea. Rules 3-5 are a bit more exible: it is
possible to violate them without destroying the illusion, but this is best done in limited
ways and for good reason, such as emphasizing a focal point of your gure.

Rule 3: The apparent color of an object is affected by both the color of the object itself and the color
of the light falling on it. This is the rule I struggle with the most, and the way I have stated it is
somewhat vague and doesn’t really tell you which color to use. There are a couple of ways to gure out
what color to use. The best way is to use reference—either nd an image of a similar color of light
falling on a similar color of object, or do an experiment with colored light sources and materials in your
home. This is recommended wherever possible. You can try other things, such as mixing the paints you
are using for the material and the light together in varying ratios, but this gets tricky. For example,
there’s a difference between the yellow of a torch, which has blue in it, and the yellow of a traf c light,
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which does not.

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Rule 4: Light moves in straight lines. People normally get this one right. This doesn’t mean you have to
follow the model exactly—you can combine the light source illusion with a trompe l’oeil illusion to
show how the light interacts with detail which is not physically sculpted on the model, but which you
are simulating with paint.

Rule 5: The strength of the light diminishes with distance from the object. People normally get this
one right too. Note that there is a difference between how this effect interacts with matte materials,
like cloth, and re ective ones, like metal. With cloth, the increase in lightness due to the cast light
diminishes with distance. With re ective materials, the apparent lightness diminishes less (and not at
all for highly polished metals like chrome), but the re ections themselves are smaller.

Step-by-step process of painting an OSL effect

The rules of light physics are about the nal result, not the process. It is important to follow them to
get a good result, regardless of what process you use. Different artists use different processes, and
that is ne. Process is important, but there are a lot of different ways to get good results.

However, there is one process I like a lot for creating lighting effects. It’s simple, produces good
results, and makes it easy to stay consistent with how light behaves. The basic idea is to start by
ignoring the color of the light source, but simply highlighting. Paint the light source white, the purest,
brightest white you can nd (which in most paint lines will be made from titanium oxide). Paint the
surrounding areas whatever colors you have chosen for those areas, and then highlight those areas
aggressively by adding white, and paying attention to where the light is coming from. Your goal is to
sell the effect of illumination by a pure white source of light. Finally, once you have successfully
created the illusion of a white light source, add in color by glazing with a bright, transparent paint,
covering all of the areas you highlighted.

I will demonstrate with two models from kingdom death: the male intimacy survivor and the white
lion. For the survivor, because of how the lantern is placed on the miniature, I can get away with
making the lantern the only light source, so that’s what I’ll do. For the lion, this is not possible, so there
will be too light sources: the lantern on the base, and a weak white light source (like moonlight) from
the opposite side of the lion as the lantern.

Our subjects, ready for paint

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These are gaming gures, not display gures, so both will have fast paintjobs designed to be effective
on a gaming table with a minimum amount of time, not display or competition-level painting by any
stretch. OSL can be very effective without spending hours on precise technical painting or creating
smooth blends. The key is to understand how the light would affect your model and to paint it
appropriately, whether you are doing a quick sketch or a time-consuming showcase piece.

For my fast gaming pieces, I like to do two-tone priming, starting with black, and then applying a white
spray from the direction (or, in the case of the lion, directions) that the light is coming from. Because I
can’t spray directly from the lanterns, I matched the direction as closely as I could while spraying from
the recommended priming distance.

Step 1: Pre-shading with primer

Since the survivor only has light from one direction, he is a bit simpler, so I will start with him.

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Step 2: Pre-shading with a brush

I did a very quick re nement to the primer pre-shade using white and black. Most important at this
step is to paint the light source itself with an opaque coat of pure white, which will help it appear as
bright as possible, to be consistent with rule #2. I also painted the body of the lantern black, to
maximize the contrast around the light source. The other important part of this step is correcting
places where the directional spray does not match where the light or shadows should be, since spray
paint does not act quite like light. I corrected the cloth closest to the lantern, and the survivor’s torso,
face, and hair.
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The pre-shading in total was only about 5 minutes of work. It doesn’t need to be terribly precise.

Step 3: Basic esh volumes

After the fast pre-shading step, it’s time to add color, starting with the skin. At this stage I painted only
the most basic volumes. I essentially treated the legs, arms, and torso as cylinders, and the head as a
sphere in terms of the highlight/shadow placement. All of the additional detail you see is created by
the sculpt and the underpainting.

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I used a thin, translucent layer of paint, so you can still see the effects of the underpainting through
this paint layer. I painted each limb separately, rst covering the entire area with a esh tone, then
adding blue to darken the shadows and keep contrast high. Since this is at night, there is little ambient
light, so it’s important that the shadows are very dark. I chose to use blue for the shadows because we
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experience night as bluer compared with day, and because it creates complementary color contrast
with the yellow of the light source. For similar reasons, I also used nightshade purple, which is a
purplish off-black color by Reaper, as my “black.”

Step 4: Re ning the esh and face

After establishing the most basic volumes in the esh, I picked out the smaller volumes, such as the
details of the face and the six-pack abs, increasing contrast at the same time. This is only about one
brush stroke per muscle, still obviously very sketchy. I could have re ned much further, but again, this
is a gaming model.

Step 5: Clothing, sword, jewelry, hair, and base

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The next step is to paint the other details to the same level as the esh. I won’t describe this step in
detail, as it is similar to steps 3-4, or any other highlighting and shading that you do. Just keep thinking
about where the light is coming from, and do all of your highlighting and shading with that in mind.

After this step, I have hopefully sold the idea that his lantern is a white light source, and all of the other
areas are illuminated by it.

Step 6: Change the color of the light

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Once I’m sure I have believably sold the light source as a white light source, it’s time to add color. Using
thin glazes of a very saturated and not too dark color, I glaze over all of the midtones and highlights I
painted.

The apparent difference between this step and the previous step is huge, but actually this step is not
very time consuming. Most of the work happened in steps 3-5, but this preparation is critical for the
payoff in step 6. All I did was apply thin, dilute glazes with yellow over all of the areas I had highlighted
in steps 3-5. (For those who like to keep track of such things, I used Reaper MSP candlelight yellow, but
any saturated, slightly translucent yellow paint should work ne, and yellows tend to be translucent.)

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Be careful to use very thin glazes, ideally with a fairly saturated but not super dark color. This is
especially important if you are using a color other than yellow for your light source, since other hues
naturally appear darker.

If I were painting to a display standard instead of a gaming standard, the sequence of steps
would be the same, I would simply spend a lot more time re ning in steps 3-5, and do
some touch-up work at the end.

Painting the lion was quite similar to the survivor, except that light comes in from two directions
instead of one, and only one of the light sources is yellow. The steps are similar, and you can see how
things change (and don’t) with two light sources instead of one.

Step 1: Pre-shading with primer

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I sprayed the lion from two

directions, to depict the light from both sources. In this case, it was a bit easier to spray the lion before
I attached it to the base. I also sprayed the base around where the lantern would be, before I glued the
lantern to the base.

Step 2: Pre-shading with a brush

Most important: opaque white paint on the lantern’s faces, black on the top and bottom. I used black
to paint the shadows cast by the top and bottom of the lantern.

I added white to the parts of the lion which would get the most light: the ribs and muscles around the
lantern, and the top of his face.

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Step 3: Face and mane

Since the lion is much larger than the survivor, and essentially all one color, I worked area by area,
always keeping in mind where my light sources are.  The pre-shading was really helpful for keeping in
mind the locations of the light sources.

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To sell that there are two distinct light sources, it helps if you can de ne the boundary between them
with shadow. You can’t cheat in order to do this—you also have to paint the light and shadow where
they make sense given the shape of the gure and where the light is coming from. For the lion, I
planned ahead by deliberately placing the light sources to make this possible. I positioned the lantern
on the base where it would best illuminate one side of the lion from below, and then placed the second
light source on the exact opposite side of the lion’s head from the lantern.

Since the lantern was not part of the sculpt, I had complete freedom in placing both light
sources for maximum impact. But even when the sculpt constrains your choice of light
sources, you still have control over the non-object light sources which come from o
camera. If you want to use lighting e ects on a mini, think about how to light the scene as if
you were a cinematographer.

Movies can be great inspiration for this, since movie-makers devote a lot of attention to
positioning the lighting for optimal e ect. I’ve been known to pause movies and take
screenshots when I see lighting I want to as reference material.
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Establish your light sources early on, and keep them in mind throughout the painting
process. One advantage of pre-shading is that it forces you to do this. When you choose
not to pre-shade, it is especially important to always be mindful of where the light is
coming from as you paint.

Step 4: Body and base

As with the survivor, I painted all of the areas of the lion as if both the off-camera light source and the
lantern were white,

In the view where the lantern light is not visible, notice that the shadows are quite dark, even black in
places. The lion still reads clearly as white, because it is painted white where it is well illuminated by
the off-camera light source. But because it is night and there is not much ambient light, just weak
moonlight and a lantern, the midtones are quite gray, and the shadows go all the way to black.

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The same is true on the side illuminated by the lantern, except that there are two light sources, with a
de nite area of shadow in between. Because most places would catch at least a bit of the light from
either the lantern or the moonlight, the shadow is not the deep black shadow of the lantern-less side,
except in a few of the deepest folds. Rather, it is mostly a dark gray midtone.

I used a black wash over all of the stone faces on the base, except the ones right around the lantern, to
make sure there would be black in the cracks and crevices in between them. I then highlighted the
stone faces with a succession of gray, focusing on the area right around the lantern. On the far side of
the lion from the lantern, where the moonlight would hit the base, I added some weaker highlights in
the direction of the other light source.

Step 4: Change the color of the light

Again, the nal step is glazing in the color of the lantern light.

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Because there are two light sources affecting the lion’s left side, I needed to be a bit more careful in
the glazing step than I did with the survivor. As a result, this step took a little bit longer, but still
represents a very small amount of time compared with the previous steps. The de ned area of shadow
between the two light sources was quite helpful for this, since it made it easy to keep track of which
areas of light were coming from the lantern vs. the moonlight. Keeping this in mind, I glazed the parts
illuminated by the lantern light, leaving the parts illuminated only by the moonlight white, and the
parts without strong illumination from either gray.

Since the different muscle groups and tufts of fur create lots of small volumes, this part was quite fun.

Of course, the lion’s right side changes hardly at all in this step.

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Voila, nished lion and survivors!

As I said above, this step-by-step shows one of many possible processes for achieving a
believable light source e ect; this is by no means the only way to do it. For instance, you
could easily skip the pre-shading steps if that is not your thing, as long as you plan your
light sources from the very beginning and shade and highlight with them in mind, achieving
the same level of contrast.

I do recommend using a process where you rst depict a convincing pure white light
source, only adding color once you’ve made the light source believable without it. When
you only add color after you add light, it’s much easier to be consistent with the physical
properties of light you are trying to replicate, the rules of physics described above.

Ultimately you can get a good result regardless of the process you choose to follow, as
long as the end result is consistent with the physics of light.

I will conclude this tutorial with some tips for getting good results with lighting effects. These are not
rules, so feel perfectly free to ignore them, but I have found they help me get better results.

Subtlety is not your friend. When a lighting effect is not working, the solution is usually to either make
the light brighter, the shadows darker, or both.

Try to avoid placing light sources where you will ght with the mini’s natural shadows. No matter
how bright you paint your lighting effect, it will be ruined if the mini casts shadows that hide it.
Sometimes you can get around this problem by repositioning part of the mini or lling in a recess
where you want to paint a lighting effect. For instance, if you want to paint a skull with glowing eye
sockets, ll the eye sockets rst, as in this great example by Jen Haley.

Highlight light sources backwards. If you paint an object in a very light color because it is glowing,
parts of it will still be in shadow, and that can spoil the effect. Increasing the lightness of the areas

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which are in shadow can fool the eye into thinking that no part of it is in shadow, similar to how
camou age works. This makes the eye more willing to accept the illusion that the object is glowing.

The glowing hose and energy pack of Kaelyssa’s gun are highlighted in reverse—the top is a saturated orange
color and the bottom is a warm yellow-white.

This is more for appreciating the miniature in person, when light is usually from overhead, rather than
in photos, where you have more control over the lighting environment.

Light interacts with different materials differently. Just like highlights from the main light source,
re ected light from a secondary or object source should be more spread out for more matte materials,
and more concentrated for re ective materials like glossy leather or metals. material, and should be
affected by the textures of rough surfaces like coarse fabric or un nished wood.

When the orange glow re ects off of the matte cloth and leather parts of Kaelyssa’s armor, it is softer and
more diffuse, but when it re ects off of her shiny metal armor, we see actual re ections of the glowing objects

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rather than a diffuse aura of light. Even a less mirror-like metal, like brushed steel, would re ect the light in a
more concentrated way compared with cloth or leather.

Avoid interacting complementary colors, or multiple secondary colors. Often in art, you are told that
complementary colors are good, because they create strong contrasts and help balance colors. This is
all true, but having light of one color falling on a surface of its complementary color is a bad way to
create complementary color contrasts. This is because of the physics of light: a surface of one color
will is poor at re ecting the light of its complementary color. Similarly, a surface of one secondary
color, like green, will be poor at re ecting light of a different secondary color (orange or purple).
Instead, it is better to use neutral tertiary colors, or combine colors of light and colors of surfaces that
mix well as paints, to create bright colors, such as yellow light falling on a blue surface to make it
appear green. You can still create complementary color contrasts, but do it in other ways, such using
the complementary color of your light source in the shadows, or having complementary colors of
materials illuminated by light of a primary color (such as a red and green fabric illuminated by a yellow
or blue light).

Yellow light is the easiest to pull off. Yellow has a lot of things all working for it. It is perceived as the
lightest of all of the colors of the rainbow, which makes it easier to follow rules 1) and 2). It is a primary
color, so it combines well with the previous tip. And yellow pigments are often translucent, which
means they work well in glazes. This will make your life easier if you are using glazing as part of your
process, such as the one I described above. Cyan is also pretty easy, for similar reasons. A bluish purple
is probably the hardest.

It can be immensely helpful to do a “lighting study” for more complex pieces. Plan what you want to
do, then try to arrange light sources to match what you have in mind, and take a photograph for
reference. This can be effective even if you can’t match the colors you have in mind—either translate
mentally or x it in photoshop.

I referred to my initial lighting study frequently while painting Abalam.

Tutorials

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KINGDOM DEATH LIGHTING OSL TUTORIAL

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31 Comments

Steve Williams
December 4, 2017 at 7:15 am

An excellent tutorial – thank you’

REPLY

David (Post author)

December 5, 2017 at 5:05 am

Glad you like it! Tutorials take a lot of time and energy to put together, so it’s good
to know they are appreciated.

REPLY

Lily
September 28, 2019 at 8:41 pm

Still being appreciated , thank you!!

REPLY

Leeroy
April 1, 2020 at 12:36 pm

Also now still 🙂

REPLY

Chris
December 12, 2017 at 10:49 pm

Very nice work

REPLY

Dn
January 22, 2018 at 7:07 pm

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Very helpful. Thank you!

REPLY

Jaehun Jung
February 10, 2018 at 4:36 am

This is SOMETHING that I want!

thanks

Can I take This tutorial to my blog? ; )

REPLY

David (Post author)

February 10, 2018 at 4:59 pm

Hi Jaehun. I’m glad you enjoyed my tutorial. You’re welcome to link the article
from your blog, or try it out yourself and blog about your results, but please don’t
copy the entire article on your blog. Thanks!

REPLY

Aphostile
February 13, 2018 at 11:45 pm

Good stuff!
Gonna try it out tonight on my KD:M models.
Thank you for the very nice tutorial! It didn’t get lost in detail while still explained everything
perfectly 🙂

REPLY

David (Post author)

May 18, 2018 at 2:28 am

You’re very welcome. Glad you found it useful!

REPLY

C
March 6, 2018 at 12:57 pm

Phew! Great job! Gonna have to OSL a horse from the Vast miniatures line. The lighting
comes from beneath the model, so i get to come up with a base that radiates red light as well.
Whee. 😛

REPLY

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S
May 16, 2018 at 5:40 pm

This is EXACTLY the tutorial I’ve been needing! Thanks!!!

REPLY

David (Post author)

May 18, 2018 at 2:51 am

So glad!

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Jack
September 2, 2018 at 6:33 am

Really appreciate the time put into this. Very illuminating! 😉

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David (Post author)

September 7, 2018 at 1:14 am

You’re very welcome. And groan. 😛

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Jack
September 2, 2018 at 6:34 am

Very illuminating! Thank you!

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Chris
September 19, 2018 at 1:20 am

What color blue did you use for esh shadows?

Thanks for this great article

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David (Post author)

September 19, 2018 at 3:28 am

I do not remember. It was just a little blue mixed in with other colors anyways, so it
doesn’t matter a huge amount. Feel free to experiment.

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Telgar
December 21, 2018 at 2:16 pm

Excellent tuto, I am planning to paint in ‘statue’ style the starting survivors of KDM, this will
help a lot.

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Phil
March 1, 2019 at 7:27 am

This is exactly the effect I’m looking for for dungeon delving minis.

Thanks for your time and effort to creat this great tutorial.

Now to practice it….

Cheers
Phil

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Adam
March 1, 2019 at 9:14 pm

Wow! What a fantastic tutorial. So good to see people writing lengthy guides like this in this
age of video, too.

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Steve Wexler
March 14, 2019 at 10:36 pm

I’m with Adam: I appreciate a written tutorial more than a video one, because I can slow
down where I need to. Fantastic work! There aren’t a lot of physicist/painters around –
congrats!

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Logan
April 9, 2019 at 2:01 am

Hello,
Great tutorioal !… and as many others i prefer a well written tutorial like this one rather than
a long boring video.

I have not your talents so i still have dif culties to get a very good osl effect, but thanks to
this tutorial i avoided big mistakes and the result is at least acceptable. Thank you.
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Javan
April 17, 2019 at 3:37 pm

Thanks for this, I’ve just recently got back into mini painting after a fairly large break and
wanted to try to improve upon my painting skills as the models I have atm aren’t exactly the
most eye catching haha.

Also just wondering what that ‘Kaelyssa’ model is from, can’t say I recognize it, but I’d love to
paint one.

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David (Post author)

May 11, 2019 at 12:01 am

Glad you like it! Kaelyssa is from Warmachine, although I made a much more sci-
version of her than is usual for that setting.

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Mr Mackenzie
May 10, 2019 at 2:31 pm

I’ve always thought I wasn’t a good enough painter to achieve OSL but I’ve been pushing
myself to get better and your tutorial is just what I needed! Can I link it to my School Club
Twitter Page?

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David (Post author)

May 11, 2019 at 12:02 am

Glad you found my tutorial useful! You’re welcome to link to it from wherever you
would like.

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Saint Toad
July 22, 2019 at 8:17 pm

Great tutorial. Very clear & practical. Thanks!

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cosmita
October 25, 2019 at 9:05 am

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Hi,

I’ve just came accross this tutorial and this is super dope.
It’s rare to encounter such painting skills mixed with such pedagogic skills on a blog post.
Working with light is my current focus and I will for sure use this this very week-end.

Thank you so much!

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Güero
November 24, 2019 at 1:25 pm

Greatly appreciate this tutorial. I share it whenever someone asks about OSL. Got it pinned
to my homescreen too.

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Philipp
January 27, 2020 at 10:30 am

Thank you so much.

I will have to paint a bunch of lightsaber-glows with no OSL experience and this tutorial is
going to help me a lot.
Unfortunately, none of the lightsabers are yellow :/

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