How To Paint Warhammer 40k

I'm going to show you how to do an orc, a space marine in the Ultramarine colours and a space marine in the Blood Angel colours. This is basically how to do orc flesh: I've got a very vibrant green here, which is the scorpion green, and I'm literally just going to do the whole area in that very bright green. Once I've done that green and it's dried off, what I'll do then is a wash of darker green on it, and that will go into the recesses and it'll all stand out.

Basically, at the moment you're looking at a blob of green, but if you tone it down with washes of darker colours, highlights of lighter colours, it'll call it all together. Here is a Gretchlin which has had its skin finished off, and you can see in the recesses it's quite dark in there, almost to a black, whereas the edges are highlighted up with the yellow, and I've sort of done the eyes with a spot of red and a white spot on there. The teeth have been done in white, so from a distance, you're looking at quite a highlighted skin there.

I'm going to show you how to do a technique called dry brushing. Basically, you want to use an old brush which is pretty much the opposite of what you want a good brush to be, so if you look at a good brush, you see it's got a very fine point on it, whereas one of these older brushes is just coming apart, it's quite sort of furry. You want to take the Ultramarine blue colour, give it a shake.

Now what you're doing is, you're putting paint on the brush, like that, and then you're taking most of the paint off the brush. Drag the brush across the figure, and what that's doing is highlighting out the ridges. You'll keep doing layer after layer of this dry brushing until you get.

It's basically turned blue but these areas that are indented, like these little grooves on the leg and on the face, have stayed black, so I'm going to show you just how to do this top leg bit.

It's literally just putting a line of paint on the very top edge of the leg, like that. I've put a thin line of Ice Blue on there, another technique would be to put a thin line of white on there and then wash that with the blue. Okay, this Blood Angel's been undercoated and given a wash of Blood Red.

The next thing I'm going to do to it, and show you a technique also, which is called wash, I'm using this dark flesh colour, which isn't actually red at all, it's a brown, but what I'm going to do is - you don't need to use a particularly good quality brush for this, because you are taking this brown paint and literally turning it into very watery consistency like that. As already, you can see where I've done it here, that red is now being toned down, and because the brown is so translucent, transparent, it's not turning it brown, it's actually keeping it red, and that brown is sort of behaving like a red colour. So that's a wash technique, and also how to get on with all the details of the face suddenly reappear from just a mass of red nothingness.

You can suddenly see those eyes and this mask bit again because that brown paint has washed into those. And that's how to paint three of the most popular Warhammer figures, the Ultramarine, the Blood Angel and the orc. .