H4H: X-Factor P3 | P4 (2016)
Transparencies
Please enjoy today’s public post. I hope you’ll consider joining with a paid subscription to see new posts every weekday.
Today’s paintings are available for purchase at the links below.
One of the features of older hardware is that people seemed to enjoy colored, translucent varieties of these that revealed the complexity and inner workings of the hardware. They were never default options, but would prove popular.
Because I have usually painted as many controllers as these systems had ports, it has allowed me to explore some of these alternate issued models. Often, a controller gets redesigned along the way during a system’s life, and when that happens I usually make that the Player Two version, with the default always Player One. But in instances where the hardware had four ports, as the Xbox did, I have some latitude to paint some others. The last Rule of the Game, on this front, is that I only paint first-party controllers. If I ever did some third party thing, it’d be its own painting and not part of the main system’s set.
I use the website Consolevariations as a resource to find alternate controllers that are both interesting and which might have been reasonably known at the time. The Green Controller S and the Blue Controller S were my choices here. Their transparencies were also just visually interesting. I procured one of each and painted them at the same time as the main hardware.
I try to paint each hardware set in a unique lighting, environmental, conceptual or technical grouping. Because I knew I was painting two transparent controllers here, I photographed all the hardware on a light table. This allowed the light to shine through the translucent portions, effectively highlighting them. I underpainted the values in acrylic, and in the first pass with acrylic used translucent colors so that they had a nice glow with the white of the board showing through. Subsequent layers and areas where the light wasn’t showing through as much, and finally the light reflecting off the surface, utilized more opaque applications.
The light table, which was just made with frosted plastic over a photo lamp, afforded me the opportunity to use some knife work in the background.
I said that these translucent hardware pieces were mostly a feature of the past, and yet, as the Xbox’s 25th anniversary approaches in November, 2026, Microsoft announced a translucent Series X console and controller in transparent green! I’ll just say I’d be more than happy to take that up as a commission, because absent a commission, another Rule of the Game is I tend to wait a good 20 years before I consider painting hardware systems for the series!