paints another Grey Knights squad.
OK - time to mix up a colour to represent infected flesh
This is a little more tricksy than just lightening or darkening up a base colour, but not all that impossible for anyone to do. (This is the dreaded Mistake, so just take on board the mixing of the colours...but fain off slapping it on the fig just yet like.)
Now I have a memory like a sieve, so luckily I took a pic of the colours I used to do it.
As you can see, we have White, Flesh, Scarlet and a Navy Blue. To be sure, though, any red will get you over the line, and ditto to any darker shade of blue. Some purple, white and flesh will do just fine as well. (red 'n blue make purple, 'n all that jazz)
Anyways, get to work mixing away like this...
Now as for amounts of what to put with what, here is a rough guide (once again, it's the use the Force method all the way):
One part Blue to 8 to 10 parts Red (a normal brushload's worth of Red to a brushpoint's worth of Blue), then with the White about 4 parts. The easy way to do this is just mix a poofteenth in bit by bit, until it gets to the second colour you can see in the above visual guide. Then about 4 parts Flesh. Once again, mix it in poofteenth by poofteenth until it gets to the 3rd colour you can see above. I guess the best advice I can give here is mixing gradually is the goal. Just so you know, I re-mixed this colour sitting in front of the keyboard to get a rough idea of the amounts I used. Got a fine match with the same colour I mixed up a few days ago. It's not rocket science. Just be relaxed and patient and it will happen for you.
Now if you are a bit of a Norman like me, you will paint it onto the infected parts of the flesh right now - and get something like this:
And this:
And this:
Now it don't look too grim...
(I give grant ye that.) But to me it just didn't look right enough. So it was back to the drawing board...
What I wanted was a much deeper red in the valleys of each ‘pucker' of infected flesh, coming up to this colour as a mid tone, then with an almost-Flesh colour on the ridge tops to make it look very fine.
So with that in mind I needed a red wash (darker red than lighter red, to boot-like).
Now my red ink is suckworthy. It's over 20 years old and has formed 'ice flows' of hardened lumps. Totally worthy of being filed under "B" for bin. Apart from that, it never seems to affix itself to the fig - meaning when we seal it with Matt Varnish, it runs and goes everywhere. We will therefore be using a paint instead of an ink for a wash on this bit. (Not a bad thing, really, as many new painters lack a huge supply of different coloured inks, and this will show you - you don't really need 'em, either.)
So, grabbing the same Red we used last time, I mixed it up with a fair dash 'o water until it looked like this:
So I guess what we are looking at is 'stained water' - or very watery paint, to put it another way. Milk consistency, even.
Now grab ye no.1 brush and with a dash of care, brush it over the infected flesh like so. Keep in mind less is more here, too. We just want to fill the valleys, not make a "bleeding Jesus" effect. (The bonus of having it watery is it will flow nicely into the gaps.)
Now we can use our infected flesh colour to brush over the red wash (once it has dried), to get this look:
OK - this is about as far as I got
Before the big ol' storm hit. Seeing as it was strong enough to blow this bone off my painting desk...
...I figured it was time to run for cover, and get the highlighting on the infected flesh done later (note 750ml beer bottle for scale).
If anyone knows what type of bone this is, let me know. My guess is it's a whale bone, due to this area being an old whaling port. Note also that a huge chunk smashed off when it went overboard (darn it!).
So anyways, we will finish off the highlighting of the infected flesh and do the clean-up in Part 4. We will also start a new bit, and get that knocked off, too.