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hi gang,

I'm having a rough time coming up with a good color scheme for salamanders skin. it should be onyx black according to the fluff (I know it was more like african skin tones with white hair in an earlier codex, but I like the onyx idea). here's what I've done so far:




it's hard to see in the photos, but this is a few thin layers of chaos black with fine highlights along the brow ridge and cheek bones of about 3:1 chaos black to codex gray and a very light drybrush over all the skin with a slightly lighter gray than the highlight mix. I'm not happy with it at all :( the whole head looks black unless you get very close to it. I considered using a much lighter shade of gray, like straight codex gray, for the highlight but I was worried it would look too cartoonish.

any thoughts or examples?

The only ones I have seen have been in the SM Codex, and the pictures are small, too hard to see any real detail. what about highlighting with Codex Gray, then hitting with a thin wash of Badab Black. That should knock some of the harshness of the highlight down.


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Beautifully done as well.

yeah, those are the only examples I've seen as well. not much to work from :p the codex gray + black wash idea sounds promising; I'll give that whirl on my sergeant and report back.


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ok, so here's how it went. started with a few thin layers of chaos black to basecoat:



then highlight most of the raised surfaces with 1:1 codex gray/water:



and finally, wash generously with badabb black and add in some detail:



teeth are a bit wonky, but eh overall, this is a huge improvement over what I came up with the first time. great suggestion! an unexpected bonus of the wash is that it makes the skin more matte vs. straight chaos black; you can see the difference in the reflections between the 2nd and 3rd pics.

I'm tempted to try just dry brushing the whole face with codex gray and then doing the black wash instead of painting the highlight on directly, but I'm fresh out of bald guys at the moment.

That did work well. I'm bald, but I don't feel like being bainted and glued down to a base so...

Hi, to paint my Sallies faces I used a very easy and effective imo method :-) simply prime black, then with another can this time of white primer, give it a couple of quick pulses from above the head to distinguish the features, then it's a case of badab black wash a few times until you reach your desired shade of Onyx!


I have other pics of them in my marine blog somewhere if you want them?

hope i helped!

Nerdfest09

I usually find that useing a very dark brown works better then pure black, in my opinion the brown looks less cartoony.

@nerdfest: I like it!

it's funny, I was just looking at your land speeder photos last night and I didn't even notice the great-looking faces.

seems like this would be similar to the dry brushing I was thinking of, so will definitely give this a try when I get my next bare-headed mini

Drybrushing might not work too well, it would look too....dry. (been there with my old orks....)

you could also use a dark brown instead of grey for the shading, if you want them to look more lively.