Hi, I am painting my units of skinks but not doing as well as I'd hoped, I was wondering if anybody could post there own methods on painting these particular models. At the moment I use hawk turquoise for the skin Regal blue for scales Undercoat black for the weapon areas Shining gold for the bands and weapons Ice blue for the crest Tallarn flesh, mech rite red and Callahan brown for the darts. Iyanden Darksun for the eyes and undercoat black for the pupils and nostrils. Bleached bone for teeth and claws. Any help regarding this blue colour scheme would be greatly appreciated. I shall try and post some pictures.
If you are new to painting, or if you are like me and have been painting for 10+ years and still suck, there are a few tricks that even the worst painter can use to produce surprisingly good results with. 1. Keep it simple. You don't need to use a million billion layers and different colors, more often that not using a few colors makes better looking and more crisp models. 2. Drybrush. There are tons of guides out there but drybrushing highlights is extremly easy and looks fantastic. 3. Washes. Washes produces crazy good looking shading effects and is also silly easy to utilize. A good way to paint any model is: paint the model in a fairly bright color (like hawk turquise), wash with similar color (I guess a blue wash would work if there aren't any turquise washes), then do a light drybrush with a brighter color (a brighter turquise or just mix hawk + a little skull white). You can't go wrong this way. As for the metal parts Im a huge fan of any gold color washed with a brown wash.
I've personally never been a big fan of dry brushing. You can get a good effect with it, but more often than not you end up with something that either looks powdery or scratchy. All the models I've drybrushed and actually liked the end result have been ones where I've done a series of drybrushes followed by glazes or washes to blend it back together, slowly building up a highlight, but I dunno if I'd consider that easy and really not that quick either. I think just starting with a reasonably bright colour and then using a nice heavy wash gives a good effect if you're trying to paint models quickly. The main thing to remember when washing is try and avoid letting the paint dry while you're still painting it, so work quickly and use a big brush. If the paint dries slightly and then you go over the same area again you'll end up with a blotchy look. If you did a white undercoat, Ice Blue crest, Hawk Turquoise skin and maybe enchanted blue scales then washed the entire model with a blue wash, wait for it to dry completely then wash just the scales in a black wash, that'd come out reasonably good and be quite quick and easy. EDIT: I should say, it's not that drybrushing can't look good or isn't well suited to certain situations like fur or metals, I just think for a beginner there's often better alternatives. My first army some 15 years ago was a Lizardmen army that was basically entirely drybrushed and it looked ok IMO (but not great ).
Wow that is uncannily similar to my skinks! I love turquoise skinks. I use different color scales and crests for different units though with the crest always a lighter version of the scales (just like you did!). It's been said before, and I wholeheartedly agree; add washes. It's super easy and makes my skinks look twice as good once I've finished painting. Go for a blue wash over everything basically and voila! I like sepia wash over gold parts, and brown wash over bone/darts/claws/teeth. If you decide to make a unit with green scales/crests or purple, I would use a corresponding wash color on those, and still do the blue wash over the skin. IMO skinks do very well with washes given their amphibious nature.