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Just looking for some pointers really. Was thinking to undercoat codex grey, drybrush a grey-white mix, then highlight white. I am a basic painter so dont things to get too complicated! I was wondering if a wash of black was worth applying at some point, or is that just ludicrous? Cheers in advance

don't use a wash. start at shadow grey, then drybrush fortress grey, then highlight white.

For hair, don't drybrush. Basecoat, then put on a watery wash into deep recesses (very runny paint, not much on the brush, just in the deep bits). Then highlight a few strands using a feather method (ie pull the brush along the length of the hair to the tip) with a fine point brush. Repeat with a second and third highlight, painting fewer strands, and less on those you do. The trick to getting it to look natural is to not highlight every individual strand the same way.

As you're a new painter, this may seem difficult, but the only trick you really need to learn is to have little enough paint on the brush so the thinned paint does not behave like a runny wash when you don't want it to. It's a key brush control technique for lots of other things later, so it's worth learning how to do this now. :-)

For grey/white (old) hair, use 1:1 fortress and codex grey as the base, with a codex grey wash, followed by repeated thin fortress grey and white highlights.

For platinum blond, bleached bone with a very light sepia wash works, followed by bleached bone and then 1:1 bone/white highlights.

Start with a grey then go up to white from that.

White hair isn't actually white*.
It's a transparent and hollow tube (the pigment is in the core of the the strand). White hair simply doesn't have ANY pigment core in it.


*Neither on animals nor humans. My hair started turning white at 16, and I'm pretty much all white now.