Eldar Wraithlord - Project Log - Part 2 - Painting Green & Gallery

As of part 1, my treasured Wraithlord looked like this:

Not good enough.

I enjoyed painting this one, so didn't stop much for photos. I'll show you how I did the green though. It's a clever way of getting a bold colour with a lot of depth with an airbrush.

First thing was to do a first highlight on the area to be painted green with a light grey - I used Game Air Stonewall grey (equivalent to old GW Fortress Grey, or new GW Astronomicon Grey, I think) - but any fairly light, reasonably neutral grey will do.

Excuse the spottiness of the gradients. I'm still very much an airbrush novice.

Then, here comes the clever bit, glaze it all over with a green ink.

An ink-ink, mind, not a pre-mixed shading wash. The term is used for both by some people.

The ink tints everything in your desired colour, while retaining the shading you've just created. It also dulls the bright highlight down a little.

Then you highlight again, this time with a lighter colour with a tone that works with the colour you're creating, but adds some depth and interest to the colour. In the Lester Bursley video I stole this technique from (https://youtu.be/waUqGovvO_4) he uses a warm orangey flesh tone to paint red. I used Game Air dead flesh (old Citadel Rotting Flesh, new Citadel Nurgling green), a very pale olive tone.

Pale, but striking, I think.

Then green ink again.

You could leave this as it is, but I was in a perfectionist mood, so I worked the highlights and shades by brush a little more.

Each successive layer adds depth to the colour, while the ink pulls it all together.

You can work back and forth adding highlight layers, then unifying the colour with ink again and again until you're happy. I, unwisely, decided I was done here, masked the green and painted the bone colour - a simple earth base, shading up with bone white, to a light highlight of pure white.

I was so very proud of this.

Apart from some freehand I definitely should have planned in advance, and which necessitated careful repainting of selected areas of the model, nothing very much interesting happened. So here's some nice piccies of the finished job.