Soft Skin Wash– A light brown wash that, unlike Flesh Wash from the core Warpaints range or Reikland Fleshshade from Games Workshop, is more of a sepia brown than a reddish hue.

Wash the hair with Akhelian Green.Once dry, highlight the top of the hair with Temple Guard Blue, followed by Blue Horror.Earlier, I promised to talk about how light is typically a white color and what this means for skin. Now is the time, and I will try to make it as understandable as possible (and I am sure my understanding is grossly simplified to start with.) The light making up what you see when you look at skin is actually made up of light that come from three different things occurring on and inside the skin. You don’t need to worry about this too much unless you’re doing Golden Daemon level work, but a basic understanding can help inform your color choices when working with skin. Layer up to Eshin Grey, gradually mixing more and more into each successive layer until it’s almost pure Eshin Grey To get a flesh color in traditional art, you mix colors. The four components of that are generally White, Yellow Ochre, Red, and Brown of some description. If you take a look at Game Workshop’s flesh category you will see that pretty much every paint that isn’t intended for Orks or weird sea elves is a mix of those four colors. Ungor and Kislev Flesh skew more towards yellow ochre, while Bugman’s Glow skews more red and brown. This even extends to darker skin tones. A very dark skin tone will hew very close to raw umber or burnt umber, with very little of the others mixed in. Drazhar is a beautiful model, maybe my favorite in the entire game, and was an absolute joy to paint as well. I won’t talk about him too extensively here, since I already wrote an article for Goonhammer about some techniques I used to paint him. If you are curious though, you can read that article here . Long story short, Apothecary White and Tesseract Glow are your friends.

After this, we go to our base coating, which is pretty simple. I hit the flesh with Rakarth Flesh for a nice pale gray tone. I go for Naggaroth Night for my purples, Leadbelcher for the silvers, and Zandri Dust for my bones. I start dark on my little evil Drukhari tubes all over the model with Dark Angel Green and hit the tabard with Bugmans Glow . Finally, the pants get a coat of Dryad Bark . The end result is a nice jumping off point for where we want to go with this model. Thin down some Mournfang Brown aggressively, then put it on the cloaks everywhere but the recesses. It should be so thin that it goes on sort of transparent – you’re really just using this to smooth out the Contrast effect so it looks nice Tau (at some point in the fluff anyway) have blue copper-based blood, and are hence various shades of blue. Add a little Warboss Green to the Waaagh Flesh and layer up, leaving the darker color in the recessesFor my Drukhari, I wanted to make clear that these are three separate subfactions who cooperate, and that they aren’t really a single army. To that end, I chose some color schemes that stand out next to one another, but have a coherent threat that joins them together. The second is light that hits the skin and bounces off, taking on the color of the actual surface of the skin. This is somewhat self explanatory, and the most similar to painting non skin-based objects. Pearl Pigment Toner – Another off-white colour. While Opal Skin leans more towards a reddish hue, this one is a bit more neutral. Can be used to lighten virtually any paint when mixed in. I could then move on to the remainder of my airbrush work on his armor. I feel like Helbrecht doesn’t quite have the traditional gold that I’d paint my custodes, Sanguinius, or Sanguinary guard with, instead having more of a brass color. I used Scale 75 Victorian Brass as a fitting basecoat, and decided the paint has enough sheen and there are plenty of crevices for a wash to shade so I didn’t need an airbrushed highlight.

Before we get started, I’m going to be using some specific techniques to really get that classic look. First up is layering. This is the simple process of covering one paint with another, leaving the previous in the recesses. So were you to paint fabric, you’d paint it with a base color and then layer up with a lighter color, leaving the darker color in the fabric folds. We’ll be doing a lot of this, especially as washes as we know them didn’t really exist in 1996. Glaze 4:1 Druchii Violet: Khorne Red heavily thinned on flushed areas, then retouch final highlightSybarite Green where it makes sense on the cloth – this is a bit of an art, but you want to put some lines to give it some definition. You can push these further with Skarsnik Green if you want A glaze of thinned Nurgles Rot applied evenly over the whole area makes skin look sweaty and gives it an unhealthy sheen Drukhari tend to be an “antagonist faction” in 40k fiction; they certainly make good villains, after all – but have had the opportunity to take center stage a few times. Highlight everything again, this time with a fine line of Skrag Brown and Ushabti Bone mixed 1:1. This is a good mix to throw in occasional fine lines as scratches too. The faces on these models are actually surprisingly well defined for plastics of their age, and extremely expressive. That expression might be one of angry bewilderment, but expression is expression. Some finely targeted washes and a little def brushwork for the eyes and teeth will finish up this most focal point.

Seraphim Sepia makes things yellow – beware of overdoing this lest your skin take on a jaundiced look. Starting to paint, my first step was the cape. Despite it being on the outside of the model, I wanted to use an airbrush to paint it, and it would be much easier to mask it rather than trying to mask everything else. You can follow my guide in How to Paint Everything: Blood Angels to see how I painted it. If you kept the combi-melta separate, this is a great time to paint it red as well. Once those airbrush steps were dry, I gave it a complete coat of gloss varnish and then masked it with Humbrol Maskol (use a brush you hate, 50/50 you end up getting liquid latex drying in the brush). Lastly is edge highlighting, which you’re probably already familiar with but I’ll establish it now anyway. It involves painting just the edges of something with a lighter tone of the base color. This is good for hard, inorganic materials like metal or plastic where the edges are clearly defined, and it helps them really pop. I’ll also refer to extreme edge highlighting which is just hitting the very corners of an object.

The wings can get some final edge highlights but that isn’t super necessary, especially if you have more than one model of these to paint. Add a little Cadian Fleshtone to the The Fang and layer up, leaving the darker color in the recesses The armor plates get edge highligting with Sotek Green, completing the classic Drukhari look, albeit with a more blue tint. Mix in a little more Tallarn Sand and layer up again, concentrating on raised areas where light would hit