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Blonde Hair

Being a dwarf player, blonde is often a colour I want interspersing my units and characters but it can be hard to paint a convincing blonde. I have come up with a method that works rather well.

You will need
Mini
Brushes
Paints; Calthan Brown, Snakebite Leather, Golden Yellow, Kommando Khaki, Dheneb Stone, Skull White and Gryphonne Sepia


Each layer should be quite thin, as not to obscure the hair strands. Also multiple layers will most likely be required for each step. Bear that in mind.

For this tutorial I have used a random dwarf body and painted only the beard. I am not being careful of the other parts of the mini as this is just for practice, on the actual mini you will want to be careful of other parts - especially existing painted parts. I also started with a black undercoat.

Step One



The basecoat is Calthan Brown. Paint it all over the hair (from here on in, the beard) until you have a nice solid colour.

Step Two



The next layer is snakebite leather. Paint this all over the beard, but try to leave the basecoat in the deepest recesses of the beard and next to facial features or body parts.

Step Three



Add a small amount of golden yellow to the snakebite and reapply to the previous layer. This will give it a more yellow tone, something blonde has.

Step Four



Add a small amount of kommando khaki to the snakebite mix. The khaki is a neutral colour and has a way of lightening without it gaining colour - it sort of mutes the colour.

Step Five



Now add some dheneb stone to the mix. This does a similar job to the khaki but is lighter in tone. The more you add the lighter the blonde will be at the end. It is also worthwhile to start picking out individual hair strands at this point.

Step Six



Here I have added some more dheneb stone to highlight the beard more.

Step Seven



Add some skull white to the mix. Again, how much determines how bright it'll turn out. Again picking out individual strands makes the beard stand out and look more than just a flat tone.

Step Eight



Wash the beard with gryphonne sepia. Don't just slap the wash on, try to add thin layers of the wash, allow to dry and repeat until happy.

Step Nine



Reapply the highlight from step seven, again looking at highlighting individual strands.

Step Ten



The final layer is to add more skull white into the mix. This is used to pick out the most prominent strands. Such as the moustache and parts of the central braid.


That is it then done. A nice blonde beard. I also used both of these techniques on the mini below;













Kuffy

Nice! That's a great tutorial. Far too often I see "blonde" models that are really painted "yellow". This is a terrific for showing how to get realistically colored blond hair - I'm going to have to try this on my models.

This is awesome! I'm gonna do this with some of Marauders!

From a blonde, Thats very realistic, i like it alot.

Kuffy i have a question.

Assuming if snake bite brown 's 1st coating can cover completely over the chaos black , can we skip every step directly to dhenebstone + white high light?

nice job!

I'll be trying this out on a few Space Wolves.

LunaHound wrote:
Kuffy i have a question.

Assuming if snake bite brown 's 1st coating can cover completely over the chaos black , can we skip every step directly to dhenebstone + white high light?

I imagine you could yes. It wouldn't look much different, except for the darker shading and extra layer. I doubt it would change the overall outcome.

Kuffy

Awesome tutorial.

Phenomenal work - I applaud your skills! I'm also going to avoid doing blonde hair like the plague, holy crap it takes a lot of work to get right!

Awesome work! This'll work great for my Space Wolves!

Great tut, and equally good result, I'm definately trying this one out, thanks

Really awesome. Gonna try it out soon myself and see how I go

I'll be giving this a go.

Great tut and Great mini, good job.

Really nice! It was easy to follow as well, great! Keep it up!

//Edge

This tutorial was very handy when painting my Malifaux.

Thank you.

I would like to know different recipes for other natural hair colourations if anyone has any...