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Hello everyone. I was wondering if you guys/girls could help me with an idea of how to paint a bonesword. I'm not incredibly good at painting, but I do want it to look good. Does anyone have any advice/tutorials? Anything helps. Thanks!

i painted mine in bleached bone then gave it a succession of coloured washes, brown, blue, red, and green. letting each layer dry in between. i have also seen them painted in black or dark blue with a blue/green lightning effect on them. whatever takes your fancy really

I paint mine using the same color and technique that I use to paint any bone areas of my Nids. Way I figure, a tyranid wouldnt care what color the sword was, it would just end up being the same color as the Nids bones / spikes.

The simplest way I can think of is to do undercoat, then bleached bone, then drybrush with white.

It'll look like bone.

Is there a simple way to do the lightning effect? Or maybe just stack layers of darkening colors (pink, then purple, then blue, then black) maybe? Down the sword, that is.

Using bleached bone or bone white with a sepia wash and then dry brushing more bleached bone always looks good.

Depending on the scheme of your army, you could change it up quite a bit. Traditionally, the bone sword matches the the overall tone of the rest of the miniature that holds it (Leviathan paint scheme = bleached bone bonesword, behemoth = red bonesword, etc.)

Examples:


I would stick with that, but you could easily vary it up a bit by doing some detailing:

Link:

I wouldn't do anything more extravagant than that, because otherwise the weapon will look out of place and draw attention from the entire miniature.