First Attempt at a Skink Priest and Jungle Swarm

So I've been working on painting my army over the last few weeks, and quickly found I can only paint so many skinks before burning out, so I decided to try painting my Skink Priest and Jungle Swarm (from CoC bits). Here are the results:

Skink Priest:


Jungle Swarms:



I need to touch up the Skink Priest a bit, but I figured I'd go ahead and show what I've done so far. Hope you like 'em, and any painting advice is always welcome!

 

The priest looks great, I realy like the black and white fethers, they are very eye catching.
The swarms look OK but they could use a wash for some shading.
oh and do a dark wash on the skinks feet as well, it will bring out the detail in his claws.

 

Thanks for the input! How does washing work? I've heard the term used before, but I'm not sure what it means as far as painting goes.

 

Washing, essentially, is diluting your paint to the point that it pools in the low points and not on the high points. It can really bring out details like the cross hatching on the jungle swarm snakes and the contours of the skink priests toe claws. I'm no expert when it comes to washing, but you don't have to be to get improved results on the final model. Just experiment with some paint and water and see how it goes.

 

Gotcha. Guess that'll be the next think I try!

 

Thanks! I tried to pattern them after the Coral snake, which is indigenous--at least partly--to South America. Felt like a apt color choice for a Lustrian army. ;D

 

I tried making my own washes out of both GW and Vallejo paints. I tried diluting with straight water, soapy water, windex, floor polish, all per suggestions I read online about making washes. In all cases I couldn't get the effect I was looking for. The pigment would be left near the edge of the wash pools and leave "tide marks" on the models.

Finally I bought the GW Nuln Oil black wash and it works perfectly. I recommend spending the $4.

 

You could also try using Army Painter's Quickshade products. Yeah it's $30 (USD) but its meant for batch washing. I haven't used it myself (yet) but have seen other's results and it looks really nice. Comes in three tones: (from lightest to darkest) soft tone > dark tone > strong tone. Here's the website: http://www.thearmypainter.com/. Of course if you just want to wash a few models, GW washes work great as well .

 

Pretty much 100% of my painting effectiveness comes from Quickshade. For the lazy/timepoor/not-so-technical painter I could not recommend this stuff enough! It made a world of difference and I've used it on about 40 models so far and not even halfway through the tin!

One thing to be really REALLY careful of though is to not overdo it. I'm lazy, so I literally dip the model in the tin then shake/wipe off the excess. If you have too much on it though it will drip down and form blobs or pools in certain spots on your model.

Also shake well, if you don't shake you just get a clear laquer which nothing will stick to!

Not WHFB, but here's a before/after shot of models I used quickshade on.

Before (Obviously still WIP at the time, but no further work was done on the red):


After: