How To Paint Orks

I am going to show you how to paint a warhammer 40k ork. This technique will also apply to your warhammer ork as they've both got green skin. So, I've got one here which has already been undercoated, if you want to know anymore about undercoating, have a look at the How to Paint Ultramarines video.

I'm going to show you how to paint a bit of leather, so I've got this color which is the vermin brown. So, you can see on the back here, he has straps. I am just going to put a bit of brown on to the straps.

You've got your paint a little bit diluted. Basically, once if you are painting a color on and it seems a bit thin, it is a lot better to paint it on thin, wait for it to dry and put another coat of thin on, then to paint it on one thick coat because you'll lose the detail in so quickly as the paint will build up, I am just showing you how to paint these leather straps. It is just a matter of thinning in the big areas and then going back filling the detail in later so I'm just doing these straps this brown.

This is basically how to do ork flesh, I've got a very vibrant green here which is this scorpion green. Once again, I am going to water it down. You don't want to put it on neat.

I am literally going to do that whole area in that very bright green. Once I've done that green and it has dried off, what I'll do then is a wash of a darker green on it and that will go in the recesses and it will all stand out. You can highlight a green with a yellow so the very edges, if you can see, the ridges obviously, not the eyebrows, because they wouldn't be yellow, but sort of the lip, the chin area, very edge of the lines.

This line up here can be highlighted in yellow, green highlights well with yellow. There other colors behave like that. If you are painting something, a dark red, the highlight areas can be yellow.

If you are doing something which is a dark blue, the highlight areas can almost be white. White can highlight a lot of things and if it is looking too bright, you can tone it down a bit with a wash of whatever color it is highlighting. With these orks usually, they've got mouths open, they've got teeth in there, so you would need to put black into the mouth then you can dry brush a little bit of bleach bone which is an off white and the very peak highlights of that white.

This light green area on the whole face, I'm going to give that a wash. So, your darker colors will seat in the recesses and it will peak out. Basically, at the moment, you are looking at a blob or green.

But if you tone it down with washes of darker colors and highlights lighter colours, it will pull it all together. So I've put that layer of darker greens onto the orks, onto this ork's head and I'll show you here is a gretchlen which has had its skin finished off. And you can see in the recesses, it is quite dark and they're almost to a black, where as the edges are highlighted up and with the yellow.

I've sort of done the eyes with a spot of red and white spot in there. The teeth have been done in white. From a distance, you are looking at quite a highlighted skin.

Obviously if you are looking at that very closely, it is going to look a bit distorted the highlights are exaggerated. But these figures are usually seen from a couple of feet away so you need to exaggerate those highlights quite a bit otherwise it will just look green. And that is how you would paint an ork. .