I have search long and far for advice on Lizardmen patterns.

And now I bring my search here.

Hello all Lizardmen players I'm in desperate need of advice, so much so that my painting has ground to a halt until I can figure it out.

Ive been a little stumped on where to take my armies colour scheme and could use some opinions. what I love most about Lizardmen is that you can paint them bright and colourful and they still look amazing, I love seeing those dinosaurs with patterns in bright colours but when it comes to my army I have an idea but not the colours.

My army will feature different colours depending on what type of unit it is, like real dinosaurs they will be different colours, so Saurus warriors will be say red whilst skinks may be orange or yellow scaled.
Now my army will have a fairly simple scheme to pull off. They will have a base colour, a colour to separate scales and such (not sure if it should be just a lighter shade or a different colour all together) then they will have a pattern which will be an entirely different colour to the skin/scales but what colour compliments whist standing out im not sure about.

Heres some inspirations Ive been looking at that kinda match the idea:












I need a way to implement these kind of schemes without constant second guessing or using uncomplimentary colours.

I'll show you what I have so far, its simple because i didn't want to do anything till I had the scheme idea down so it just has its base colour and a little wash shading.



How can I get the same style as the images above on my troops? which colours go with and compliment their shade of dark red, what colour should I use for the pattern, should it be a bolder, brighter colour or even darker?

 

Re: I have search long and far for advice on Lizardmen patte

For brighter colors you might try blocking out some places with an undercoat of white,
after that is good and dry try some bright colors over those areas.

 

Re: I have search long and far for advice on Lizardmen patte

I recently tried some pattern painting on my bastiladon which ended up pretty decent. I drybrushed several similar colours on each other, starting with the darker and going lighter. Like this:

Blue shell/undercoat. Darker orange pattern -> lighter orange pattern covering almost all of the darker orange -> yellow pattern again covering nearly all of the previous pattern. All of the pattern apart from the blue undercoat was done with drybrushing even though I don't use that technique that much on my lizardmen.

PS: I might get my finger out of my... ear and post some pics sometime soon!