Advice on Skeletons

[CrazyIvan]

Alrighty, so...I met with some limited success painting up a Marienburg warband for Mordheim, and I\'ve embarked on the larger, more ambitious project of painting up a Vampire Counts force...

I\'d like to do a desert theme, and at the moment, I\'ve been using the classic brown undercoat, bone drybrush, faint white highlight. While nice in that it gives the figures a \"dirty\" look, and some of the incompleteness of dry brushing comes out as looking like fragments of dirt...I\'d like these minis to look as good as possible.

I\'ve been told that individually painting the bones will result in a far superior looking mini, but is there a way to do that and maintain the dirtier look? The painted-bone figures I\'ve seen are just too darn clean. Other suggestions?

 

[MaestroOfMayhem]

Try watering down your paints more when you dry brush, and do more layers. So I would base bubonic brown, drybrush with a few thinned layers of bleached bone and then pick out the areas between the bones with brown ink or thinned dark brown. For dirty metal base your sword with dwarfe bronze, highlight this with boltgun metal and use a brown ink wash then 1 last highlight of thinned chainmail. It give an interesting effect I use on my Skaven.

 

[frenchkid]

here is a site were you\'ll find more articles about painting skeletons than you ever wanted. :
http://www.paintingclinic.com

 

[Trevor]

I find a white undercoat with a bone wash looks great and is very quick and easy. The bone wash is a brown wash with a little green mixed in, the more green you add the grungier and more manky the bone looks. You can of course wetbrush (as suggested drybrushing with thinned paints) over this to get more highlights.