OSL Fun times

The final stage for my Captain was the OSL step for the plasma pistol.  My army seems to have hydrogen or nitrogen plasma (there was a reddit post about it awhile back and there's cool info and images here) so I make sure they all glow with a pink color (Screamer Pink).  In hindsight I wish I had picked something that didn't look like Pepto, but I was trying to differentiate the effect from everything else, and purple/pink was basically the only available tone.

My older models didn't really achieve any OSL effect, but looking back at them you can imagine them as either warming or as not in 'plasma overcharge' mode.  Recently I decided to go for it on my Mk 5 Sergeant and it turned out pretty good.  This time I wanted to also add the effect to the front vents and nozzle/barrel as well.

Also, last time I pretty much winged it, so this time I wanted to follow someone's process.  I went with Juan Hidalgo's plasma tutorial which was pretty good and basically followed what I had seen before.

I converted his colors to mine (which was Volupus Pink Contrast instead of Blood Angels Red Contrast, and then various mixes of Screamer Pink and Vallejo White going from pure Screamer, then 50/50, up to 80 White + 20 Screamer) and then set at it.

The first step was to undercoat the coils white.

Then paint on contrast.

Next was the coils, vents, and nozzle 

Then the OSL glow effect as a glaze on raised areas around the coils and vents, and by the adjacent surface.  Its really important to be subtle.

It wasn't quite right when I went to bed and I realized that I didn't have a proper wash consistency on the 3rd step to flood the coils and get the capillary action into the recesses of the coils so I had to go back this morning and really bring it up a notch.  I also gave a bit more of the metallic 'concentrated' reflection to the side of the helmet which really improved the effect.  The lighting for the final shot was a bit brighter than the in process pictures (sorry), but I'm pretty happy that it does look like it is glowing now.

So moral of the story is, be sure to have a wash/glaze consistency to flood into the recesses, and you can always go back and fix things.