help: fetid drone flesh blending/transition

[Guest]

Attempting to step up my skills and do better transition/blending but not sure how to do it without washes.

 

I can do it with bone/horn but that is a simple color it the various colors and blend with agrax earthshade.

 

Now I am trying to blend from a pale palid wych flesh to a dark screamer pink on my fetid drone. I like the colors of the tentacles on my nurgle to be that dark screamer pink as it looks engorged with blood and alive but on the fetid drone there is a mass of flesh that I wanted to look more zombie like which I was going to go with palid wych flesh and Athonian Camoshade shade to give it that sickly green pale skin. The issue is that it attaches to the tentacles at points and I'm not sure how to transition between the two. To make this even harder there is metal bands that wrap around the skin that I wanted to make them appear bruised/swollen in those areas. 

 

I could just paint all the flesh screamer pink but that might be too much screamer pink for the flesh, I wanted the screamer pink to draw contrast from the armor but not overwhelm it... I don't know what I'm talking about though.

 

 

Any advice would be welcome, I tried searching youtube and there is some good tutorial but nothing I could relate or translate to what I needed as I'm not that great with colors.

 

 

Note: I am using the 30k Death Guard theme which means the armor is Rakarth Flesh, so I am attempting to avoid that color as it would blend in with the armor.

[Adeptus]

The trick is not to mess around with lots of different colours, but to find the best ways to apply them.

 

What I would do is add a small amount of the pink to some lahmian medium and apply it as a glaze, and apply several coats adding layers where you want the colour to be the strongest. And then I'd shade the pink bits with some black to give it a really putrid, infected look.

[Arkhanist]

Glazing is the way I'd go for this. A glaze is basically very dilute paint. Citadel paint is made up of water, binder (acrylic), and pigment. Add too much water, and the binder can't do its job and the paint gets uncontrollable. Thus the use of a medium (which is basically additional binder & water) to dilute the pigment instead - it also has the advantage that the result still 'feels' like paint, but is just quite transparent. Something like 1:4 or 1:5 mix of paint and lahmian medium to get a reasonably thin glaze; you can use other mediums too, such as vallejo glaze medium, and play with different ratios. Don't have too much on your brush, so you can control it.

 

The point of a glaze is that it 'tints' the colour underneath, rather than overrides it as you do with layering. Unlike a wash, you don't want it just in shadow and crevices, but to tint the whole surface. So you can extend one colour over the other, and blend them together that way.

 

In this case, you could paint both palid wych flesh, and glaze the tentacles with pink several times (strengthening the colour) while extending the glaze only once or so onto the torso to get a blended effect. Or paint the tentacle pink, and just blend over the join with a pink glaze. You can of course use conventional washes to shade each segment independently.

 

You can see the latter technique with two very different colours in this nagash video at about 5:30.

 

You can also use glazes to tint the flesh to indicate bruising around the metal. Red, purple and blue can all work, depending upon the effect you're after. With glazing, you can even use more than one! You can start with the appropriate wash/shade (since it's already somewhat transparent) then add medium (maybe 1:3 shade to medium) to turn it into a glaze.

 

Another technique that does the same trick is known as wet blending - basically you take the two colours when they're both still wet, and feather them together. It's much easier to do in oil than acrylic as acrylic dries too quickly, and for lighter colours a glaze is definitely simpler and more organic. 

Edited September 11, 2017 by Arkhanist

[Atia]

What Arkhanist said - you want to use glazes to tone the skin differently in different parts of the model.

Edited September 11, 2017 by Atia