Tutorial: Skin Tones – Method 1

February 6, 2020February 6, 2020 DebbieForster2 Comments

The Daily Head seems to have been rather successful on twitter and so I have decided to share how I am doing the skintone practice with others. This is the method I learned at Seige Studios on their course. I have others I want to try out as well, but seeing how I have already got a few heads base coated, I wanted to stick with this way until I need to make some more.

Step 1: Base Coat.

I airbrushed the bases of all the heads starting with Cadian flesh, moving on to Kislev flesh and then a final highlight of Flayed One Flesh

Step 2:

Wash the entire head with a very watered down Seraphim Sepia.

Step 3:

Recess shade all the recesses with neat Seraphim Sepia.

Step 4

Recess shade two thirds of the recesses with Agrax Earthshade – not watered down/thinned.

Step 5:

Recess shade one third of the recesses – started from the nose/centre of the face, with Nuln Oil.

Step 6:

Black out everything that is not the face – this will stop the mind getting confused while you focus on the face. We are trained to know faces from birth, so keeping the face upright will also really help with this. Also shade in the eyes! I use black 70.950 by model colour for this as it is a nice matt black, but Abaddon Black will also suffice.

Step 7:

I have a special brush for eyes. It’s a fine detail brush with the point cut off to make it flat – this makes excellent dots without the point slipping and creating a mess. Use this amazing dot brush to place a dot at the two sides of each eye, as shown. Most of the time, this gets rid of the boogly eye that you get when you dot the black in the middle.

Also, highlight the ‘T Zones’ of the face with thinned down Kislev flesh. If you want a paler look, Flayed One Flesh would work here too.

Here is my progress so far. I know my brush control has improved from the first one. Things can only get better from here too. Just keep practicing!

Tutorial – Battle Damage

August 30, 2019August 29, 2019 DebbieForster1 Comment

I started to practice battle damage on one of my tanks during some personal hobby time the other evening and someone asked if I would be able to tell them how I did it. Here is my step by step guide to creating battle damage on vehicles:

Step 1: Basecoat and edgehighlight the tank. Don’t worry about being super duper neat with the edge highlights, those parts that are a bit thicker or smudgy you can create chips with later. I am going to focus on the one panel for the purpose of this tutorial.

Step 2 – Take a piece of sponge and dip it into the highlihgt colour. Wipe most of the paint off, as though you were drybrushing, and spot it over the panel which is to be damaged.

Step 3: Using the edge highlight colour, paint in sharp, jagged shapes within the panel. Jagged is important. Don’t use soft lines!

Step 4 – Paint inside the jagged shapes with Dark Brown – I have used Doombull in this case. Do not paint over the edge of the highlight colour, you want a small edge between the base colour and the brown.

Step 5 – Paint inside the brown with a darker brown – here I have used Dryad Bark.

Step 6 – Paint another layer of darker brown inside what you have done already. I have used Dryad bark mixed with Black 50/50.

Step 7 – Use Seraphim Sepia to paint lines of rust from the lowest point of the damaged space. This creates the effect of running gunk from the battle damage.

Step 7 – This effect can be used over decals as well.

I hope that helps! I would love to see people’s attempts at battle damage if they decide to try it out.

miniatures. · painting · Painting Tutorial

Tutorial: Lava glow (Abaddon’s Cloak)

July 29, 2019July 29, 2019 DebbieForsterLeave a comment

A lot of people have asked me how I painted ABaddon’s cloak, so instead of explaining it all individually, I decided to find a mini and do a tutorial on it instead. This technique comes down to two things; time and effort. It took a long time for me to do Abaddon’s cloak and no small amount of effort either. Now, that said, here is how I did it.

Equipment:

Paints are: Abaddon Black, Khorne Red, Evil Sons Scarlet, Wild Rider Red, Fire Dragon Orange, Flash Gitz Yellow and White Scar. There is a lot of mixing involved in this as well, so a good palette is useful to have too.

Step 1 – Paint the cloak ABaddon Black, when the paint is dry, sketch on the design lightly. I have gone for an eye this time around. I didn’t photgraph this, we have all seen a black cloak before I assume.

Step 2: Mix 50/50 Abaddon black and Khorne Red and paint over the pencil lines. I also go over the edge of the cloak and around any holes. I’ve added a few fancy bits in here and there. Don’t worry about the lines being thick, each layer needs to be a tiny bit thinner than the last to build up the glow effect.

Step 3: Paint over the same lines with Khorne Red.

Step 4: mix 50/50 Khorne Red and Evil Sunz Scarlet and paint over the lines.

Step 5: Paint over the lines with Evil Sunz Scarlet.

Step 6 Mix 50/50 Evil Sunz Scarlet and Wild Rider Red and paint over the lines, trying to make them thinner than the last layer.

Step 7: Paint the lines with Wild Rider Red

Step 8: Paint with 50/50 mix of Wild Rider Red and Fire Dragon Orange.

Step 9: Paint with Fire Dragon Orange.

Step 10: Mix 50/50 Fire Dragon Orange and Flash Gitz Yellow

Step 11: Paint with Flash Gitz Yellow. I have neglected to take a picture of this stage, for which I am very sorry!

Step 12: Paint with 50/50 Flash Gitz Yellow and White Scar. By now the layers should be very thin and that glow should be showing up.

Step 12: Touch up and pin highlight with white – don’t go too beserk with the white otherwise it looks odd.

I hope this answers all the questions you may have, if not feel free to get in touch and ask, I will try and answer them as best as I can. I would love to see any results of using this tutorial as well, so please send me pictures!!

40K · fine detail · miniatures. · Painting Tutorial

Tutorial: Freehand Skulls

June 19, 2019 DebbieForsterLeave a comment

So, building on what I wrote about painting bone, I thought I would share how I paint freehand skulls next. This is just my thoughts on the subject, and I am sure there are countless others out there. This is what works for me.

First off, you’re going to need the following:

As well as a wet pallette, brushes, paint thinner and clean water. You will also need a picture to follow. I used the Legio Mortis one I used the other day for the freehand on the top of the Reaver, but there are plenty of good pictures out there on Google too.

Step 1:

Use the pencil to sketch the outline of the image on the panel you’re going to be painting on:

The shape does not have to be perfect, so long as it is a guide.

Step 3: Shade the skull shape in with thinned Rakarth flesh

Don’t worry about the thinner parts, they will be covered up as we layer the paint!

Step 4: Mix Ushabti bone with Rakarth flesh 50/50 and start picking out the bits that are going to be highlighted.

Step 5: Add extra highlights to the lighter spaces with Ushabti Bone – wet blending comes in handy here.

Step 6: Mix Ushabti bone and Screaming Skull 50/50 and continue to add lighter patches, they should be getting smaller each time. You might want to add some white in as well, depending on how light you want the skull to be. I only added a tiny bit to this stage, but neglected to take a picture.

Step 7: Mix 75/25 Rakarth flesh and XV-88 and start shading down the darker parts of the skull.

Some of the blends here look a little harsh, that will be fixed next stage.

Step 8: Add a little more XV-88 to the mix and keep shading down those key areas in the design – refer to the picture as a guide as well, it is what it is there for after all.

Step 9: The final stage is to use black to define the eye sockets, the nose and to tidy up around the edges as well, seeing how this is on a near black backing.

My main points when doing freehand would be: don’t rush it, thin layers are always better, and have a picture to refer to as well!

Like my tutorials? Consider funding my terrible coffee addiction: Ko-fi.com/hereticdeb

miniatures. · Painting Tutorial

Tutorial: Bones

June 13, 2019 DebbieForsterLeave a comment

A friend of mine recently asked me how I painted bone, so instead of telling them, I said I would create a tutorial for them to have so they can refer back to it. This is how I paint bone on skeletons and other actual bones, rather than freehand. I will do a seperate tutorial for freehand as it is slightly different.

Step 1: I use these paints for bone:

Step 2: Collect the miniature and apply a base coar of Rakarth Flesh.

Step 3: Wash with Agrax Earthshade and let dry

Step 4: Drybrush with Ushabti Bone.

Step 5: Drubrush with Screaming Skull.

Done.

Of course, you can go lighter than this but I like my skeletons to look a bit dirty. Nothing comes out the ground clean after all.

miniatures. · Painting Tutorial · Warhammer 40k · Wh40K

Resin Wash 101

May 22, 2019 DebbieForster2 Comments

I make a daily to do list on twitter so I can keep myself focused and know I am achieving things. On my list today was wash and assemble the NL guy, and I was asked about how to clean resin. I decided to do so in a blog post in case there are other people out there who don’t know how to do this but don’t want to ask. Here we go, a step by step guide to cleaning up resin:

1 – Equipment: You need the following – A bowl of luke-warm water, an old toothbrush, some washing up liquid and a tea-towel or other type of towel and the mini you want to clean up:

2 – Put a small drop of the detergent into the water.

3 – Add the mini to be cleaned up.

4 – Use the toothbrush to scrub over all parts of the mini. Try not to be too vigorous else you’ll end up with breakages and that would be a disaster. There are no pictures of this as using a phone with wet hands is going to be troublesome.

5 – Place clean parts on tea-towel to dry.

6 – Throw away the water and wash your hands. Resin tasting water is gross and leaves a weird taste in your mouth as well.

I hope this helps. I may well write one on bending miniatures back into shape. Resin is pretty easy to reform and it is oddly satisfying as well.

I also realise that my Reaver Titan is made of resin… it has many, many parts, some large… I need a bigger bowl.

40K · hobby · painting · Painting Tutorial · warhammer

Tutorial: Wet Blending.

February 9, 2019 DebbieForster5 Comments

I was asked the other day about wet blending and how I do it so I said that I would run through how I do it as best as I can. I’ve taken some pictures to try and illustrate the process.

Step 1:

Wet Palette. Nothing fancy, just a take away tub, a sponge and some baking paper:

When adding water to the wet palette, I keep the water just below the top of the sponge. This is my personal preference and it is a case of finding what works for you.

Step 2:

Select the paints you’re going to use. I am painting a cloak on a Stormcast for the purpose of this tutorial and I am going for dark purple.

Step 3

Paint the darkest colour as a base on the area that is going to be blended. Don’t worry if it looks watery or parts of the undercoat show through, this will be fixed when blending.

Step 4:

While the paint is still wet, get the next lightest colour on your brush – not too much of it though – and mix it in the spaces you want to be lighter on the miniature. Try and make the two colours mix without any clear lines between the two.

Step 5:

Repeat this with the lighter colour for the places you want to be lighter. Again, try to do this without leaving any clear lines. I always try to get as smooth a blend as possible.

Step 6:

I also added some darker blends with dark blue because I wanted to add depth to the purple. You can see it in the second image above.

That is how I wet blend. I am aware that this is a tricky skill, or can be, for some and it takes a lot of practice. I’ve popped a couple of examples of what you can do with wet blending, though the limits are just your own thoughts. I hope this has helped!

Larry was a speed paint in half an hour – his blend is less than perfect!

I use wet blending for the base of all the galaxy cloaks I paint.

40K · miniatures. · Painting Tutorial · Uncategorized

Tutorial: Gems and Fur

December 1, 2018 DebbieForsterLeave a comment

Last week, I had a couple of questions about how I have done Gems and Fur on a Space Wolf I am currently working on. I decided that writing a quick tutorial would be better than explaining it – pictures make everything easy right?

Gems: I used these colours for the tutorial –

Step 1: Paint the base of the gem in Warpstone Glow or the medium colour you decide to use.

Step two. Paint one of the sections of the gem in the brightest colour.

Step 3: Paint the opposite section in the darker colour.

Step 4: Mix the light green with the yellow 50/50 mix and use this to highlight around the edge of the bright green. I also added a spot of the yellow to the centre to make it pop that little bit more.

Fur:

These are the colours I used for the fur:

Step 1: Paint the fur with the darkest colour – Dryad Bark in this case.

Step 2: Wash with Agrax and then go paint something else or make a brew while it dries.

Step 3: Mix Dryad Bark with the XV-58 50/50 and then drybrush it over the fur

Step 4: Drybrush with XV-58.

You can keep going of course, depending on how much variation and how light you want the fur. This mini is a Chaos Sorcerer so I figured that he’d be pretty dirty – there are no showers in the Eye of Terror…

I hope this proves to be useful!

40K · Painting Tutorial · Uncategorized · Wh40K

Tutorial: Galaxy Cloaks!

September 4, 2017August 21, 2022 DebbieForster10 Comments

I have never written a tutorial before but when I was asked about the galaxy cloaks the other day and how I did them I volunteered to do one. I have tried to keep it as simple as I can!

Step 1: Coffee – an essential must have for all painting endeavors

Step 2: Background – I use Abaddon Black as the base for the galaxies so I make sure the entire area is covered and even before I start. I also find that having an image as a reference is very useful, though I do not often refer to it!

Step 3: Base colours. As I was going for a blue based galaxy, I used Kantor Blue and Xereus Purple. At this point, I use one of my very old brushes and stipple the paint on carefully. I don’t put a great deal of paint on the brush and I create the outline of the galaxy.

This is a little dark, sorry about that!

Step 4: Using the same brush, I then go over the outline with a lighter colour – in this case, I used Caledor sky and Xereus Purple mixed with Mephiston Red. I also make sure not to put as much on the brush as at this stage, you want to start seeing spots of colour.

Step 5: Here is where I swap to a smaller brush and begin to build up the layers that form the galaxy. Using watered down – this makes the paint much easier to manipulate – Sotek Green, Temple Guard Blue for the blue and Xereus Purple with a mix of Emperors Children, I then blend and build up the colour until it looks natural.

This one has a swirling appearance to it – use the watered down paint to build the colour up!

Step 6: Stars. This is the step where I add the first layer of stars. I use a very fine brush to spot on the stars that are the same colour as the blended parts. You can add them at a varying sizes too.

Step 7: More Stars. This time, I use white to add in stars. They add a final striking layer to the cloak. I also use a range of sizes and this time, I put in a small cross to show one as twinkling.

So, there you have it, a whirlwind explanation of how to create groovy galaxy cloaks. I am going to be giving them to all psyker type models for the time being as I think they fit the theme. Space Wizards need wizardy cloaks that look like space… Here are a couple of others I have done!

If you found this tutorial useful, please consider buying me a kofi: https://ko-fi.com/hereticdeb