Runes runes the musical fruit

In front of me I have six freshly basecoated Screamers of Tzeentch and an itching to do something new. I've decided to try my hand at some glowy freehand runs across their backs. I was ready to sit down and crank out another set identical to ones I had painted before, and realized that wanted to get them finished as quick and easy as possible was going to severely limit me as a painter. I have spent weeks painting my ork aircraft and learnt many things doing it - I should treat my organic models the same way I do my mechanical ones.

It took me a little while of sitting and thinking what I wanted to do. I do like the blue and white paint scheme but couldn't think of a way to make it engaging for the viewer. That's when I decided some freehand and maybe a bit of OSL would come in handy. Inspiration for both Tzeentch and freehand work comes in one handy package, the painter Ana.

http://www.coolminiornot.com/artist/Ana?browseid=4092441

Her freehand is always amazing and she has arguably the best painted Tzeentch models available for viewing. Going through her gallery steeled my nerve: it's probably going to take ages and involved scrubbing the models a few times, but I'll be damned if by the end of it I don't have my first glowy freehandy awesomey models.

In particular I like this model of hers:

If you look in the shell there are some beautiful runes in there. And I was in luck! She has on her own blog a series of photo tutorials showing you progress through the whole model, one of which shows her painting the runes from beginning to end.

http://paintingmum.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/tzeentch-your-minis-several-photo.html

Part of me - as always - just wants to dive right in and start scribbling on things. I know this won't work and I need to sit and sketch out what doddles I want on there. The temptation to do a tiny 'Tzeentch was here' on the underside of a screamer is strong, but I probably shouldn't...

I'm going to search about for some more excellent inspiration to share and a good ye olde runey resource to get designs from. I'm playing alot of Kingdoms of Amalur at the moment which is a gorgeous design resource, maybe I'll see if they have a made up rune language in there...