Painting my Lizzies

I am basically a new painter, played and painted awhile ago and am new to the Foundation and Inks that are now available. I understand most of the basics but I am painting my Lizards Black with Orange Scales maybe yellow on certain units, but was curious about painting black. I love how contrasting it is but was curious if there was a good way to highlight it, or if there was a certain technique to painting black that I am just unaware of thanks.


T

 

Well first you must decide if you want "black"-black or just a very dark color.

For example; a basecoat of chaos black with a thin drybrush of Necron Abyss may look black at first glance but will have a blue tone to it (works best with greens n blues, purple and maybe a really dark red to some degree) In that case you can then add even lighter tones, carefully, to raised areas.

However, black, as in black, has no several tones but will reflect lightning and appear grey-ish to white on raised areas and sharp edges. So simply highlight with greys and white.

>NOT TESTED!< - I believe a really easy way to achieve a fast result is to basecoat Chaos Black and then add a coat of Gloss Varnish. Should add some depth and reflect lightning in a way that makes the model look realistic. However, it would also make your model shine, alot

Hope that helps. Personally I think painting black is really anoying, so I would prolly go with the first method - a really dark tone color, especially if I was going to use it as a permanent scheme.

 

will that necron abyss work well with orange scales?

basically i am kind of thinking of going of the basis of a gila monster

 

ohhh and I did buy a bit of gloss varnish to paint on figured since they are lizards maybe they should seem shiny...

 

I did a couple of test models in red and black, it does look rather striking. I chose not to go with it for my army though. Link.

Also, don't have a link now, but there is a very well painted volcano theme army that is red and black, looks very very nice. I think it was on the GW website somewhere, and got posted here ages ago. Worth a look if you can find it.

 

so did you use black as a base and then drybrush a blue over that black?
looks good to me so figured i would ask if you will divulge a secret or two

 

The one on the right is black and grey. Black undercoat followed by light drybrush of codex grey, then very very light drybrush of fortress grey, then a fair bit of badab black wash. I'm pretty sure that was all I did, if the wash makes it too dark you can of course add a small amount of grey on top of that. It is a pretty easy and fast technique.

 

awesome i will try it out thank you let you know how horrible i bungle up the easy technique

 

Have a look at the colours i used for mine in the skink colouring post, its gray over black with orange scales

 

i do like your scheme

 

Strewart that worked relatively well and I think it gave me the desired effect and that is how I am gonna go about it thank you, now to figure out how to make these orange scales POP haha

 

No worries, glad it helped.

You probably won't want to follow my technique for scales, it involves scab red as a base coat then working up through 4-5 layers of highlighting with various mixtures of scab red, blood red, foundation orange and sunburst yellow PLUS some coats of washes to smooth it in between.

Think about what kind of effect you want and how dark you want the base to be for that effect though. Mine started at scab red then I applied black wash to really darken the crevices, which is why the orange/yellow peaks of the scales stands out and the deeper areas are still very very dark. You might want an overall brighter look so starting with a brighter colour.

 

Yea actually your technique is really nice and I will probably use it to a degree, I would like the crevices to be darker so I will use black instead of the baal red I am using right now. I will have to get some pictures so you can all make fun of them haha.


T