I've done a few portrait shots in college, the gradient colors you can achieve are pretty cool. I haven't tried replicating the effect in miniature though. It's amazing how many lights you can use in a portrait shot, hair lights, fill lights etc.
I thought about grabbing some of these toys called finger lights.
http://www.houseofrave.com/ultra-led-finger-lights.html
Use a small poll inside my tent to hold multiple lights so I could get varied intensities of colored light on different spots on the subject.
Here's some of my shots of playing around with light. .
