Painting beastmen
Hi there,
You might try this, to avoid the chalkiness:
1) Base coat with a medium color in your fur\'s color palette. Use thinned paint and several layers for full coverage, rather than one or two thick layers.
2) Make a wash of a dark color in the fur\'s palette by thinning down the paint to the consistency of milk. When you dip a brush into the wash and pull it out, you should be able to see the bristles through the wash. You can try painting the wash onto your fingertip too...if you can see it settle into the creases in your fingerprint, leaving the ridges relatively light, it\'s about right. Use more than one wash that too thin rather than one wash that might be too thick. Start with washing the whole area of the fur, then go back and re-apply the wash into the recesses of the fur, on it\'s underside, etc., lending more shadow to the places that ought to be dark. Also, don\'t slather it on leaving puddles, but rather treat it like a paint. Too much wash will dry funny as the water evaporates. Sometimes the pigment will creep up out of the valleys of the figure, pulled out by the surface tension of the water as it dries.
3) Using the thinned base color from step one, \"damp-brush\" the fur. Dip the brush into the paint, wipe most of it off, then lightly stroke the fur with the brush, across the grain of the fur, working on the the main areas of the fur and leaving the recesses dark. Repeat if needed, working more on the highlight areas.
4) Lighten the paint a bit with some white (or ivory/bone if you\'re using browns), and \"damp-brush\" again, concentrating on the highest highlights. Repeat if needed, but keep the brush damp (not wet, or the paint will flow into those nicely shaded small creases, and not too dry of you\'ll get chalking).
The key is to keep all layers of the paint thin. Also, true dry-brushing (where you wipe paint off until barely anything is coming off the brush) is easier, but the paints we use tend to go all chalky when used this way.
Hope this helps,
Will
