Painting a Rock base with some sand

[INKS]

This is for Be'lakors base.

So it's Stone / Rock and then sand added to the base to the rim

I am following a guild but I am not sure I need so many paints honestly.

here is what is being used.

 

Skavenblight Dinge    Base Rocks 1
Stormvermin Fur    Base Rocks 2
Dawnstone    Base Rocks 3
Administratum Grey    Base Rocks 4
Grey Seer    Base Rocks 5
Creed Camo / Contrast Medium    Base Rocks 6
Argos Dunes / Contrast Medium    Base Rocks 7
Basilicanum Grey / Contrast Medium    Base Rocks 8
Abaddon Black    Base sand 1
Eshin Grey    Base sand 2
Dawnstone    Base sand 3
Administratum Grey    Base sand 4

 

It's sort of a gradient of grey on the rocks. Not sure how many of those greys I really need.

Rocks are primed grey and then goes from 1 to end.

 

[Grotsmasha]

Just watched through the guides you linked in the Belakor thread (assuming its the base from those guides), and I have some suggestions.

1. after the primer grey coat, do the blood effects first, this will save a WHOLE bunch of tidy up later (it will be much easier to tidy the red that gets caught in the dry brush vs. getting grey back into the recesses).

2. If you have any of GW washes, the Contrasts aren't necessary. Athonian Camoshade for Creed Camo, Seraphim Sepia for Aggaros Dunes, both still thinned.

3. The stippling stages of Skavenblight and Stormvermin are extremely suble, and will be latgely unnoticable in the finished product. I'd instead go straight to the washes of the Primer Grey, then straight into the Drybrushing stages, as these will still geve you the underlaying variation of the stone.

4. I'm not so sure how important the Basilicanum layer is, and to be honest the colour used looks NOTHING like the Basilicanum Grey I have.

5. I would do the sand at the same time as the stones, then use Contrast Black Templar to take it to the Black of the guide.

[INKS]

thanks! yeah same video

I'll go through it on my spread sheet and eliminate some of it.

[Antarius]

I also think you can safely skip a couple of those steps.

 

One thing I will add is that when painting rocks, make sure to have some tones in there that are not pure grey/blue-grey if you’re not going for a very clean and crisp look. I used to struggle with rocks and walls looking too sterile, until I started adding in lots of other tones - it can seem a bit weird at first, because we tend to think rocks = grey, but generally speaking, you can’t go wrong with adding pretty much any other tones at random, as long as the colours are watered down a bit.

[Firedrake Cordova]

You could probably safely pick a few of the base "tones" (the greys with a different tint/leaning), create the mid-tones and highlights by adding varying amounts of ivory to the base. If you wanted to add further variation, you could pick out some rocks with an Agrax/Seraphim/Athonian wash/glaze? I remember back in the days when GW released the circular tower ruins, they basically used a grey and a sandstone, and then washed some of the bricks at random to create a number variations within the two colours to make it look less uniform.

Edited September 10 by Firedrake Cordova