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Hi guys, so I've just recently started collecting 40k orks, and well not being the best painter in the world, I'm finding painting the flesh A: quite tricky and B: time consuming

Does anyone out there have a good technique to get them painted up to a decent tts in quickish time please?

Thankyou!

Depends on what colour you are trying to achieve, but a basic base coat - highlight - wash formula should do the trick.

Green skin is actually one of the easiest things to paint and so long as you can handle basic shading it's difficult to get it totally wrong. The tricky part is often getting the right tone to look good with your other colours.

I'm not 100% familiar with the new citadel paint range, but here are my best guesses...

Start from a black undercoat. Use drybrushing to do all the metal areas, then do the base (typically just a thick coat of brown and some drybrushing), the clothes (base coat and simple highlight in a paler shade) and finally the skin.

For a subdued 'realistic' look, paint all the flesh in a dull green base coat (I think Death World Forest would be a good choice), then use a pale sandy yellow (Dorn Yellow or Zamesi Dessert, for example) to highlight raised areas and especially everywhere which would be pink on a human (lips, cheeks, eyebrows, upper eyelid, brow, nostrils, elbows, knuckles, palms and fingertips), using thinned paint and a small brush, working in layers and using small strokes. Don't worry if it's looking a little pale at this point, because the washes will darken it down again.

Then give all the skin a wash of green shade (like Athonian Camoshade). Use a fine brush to add a red glaze (such as Bloodletter) into the nostrils, eyes and mouth. Paint the teeth and nails light brown (Zandri Dust). Add a paler highlight (Screaming Skull) to the teeth. Finish off the entire model with a dark brown wash (like Agrax Earthshade) to tie everything together.

There are quite a few tutorials online for quick and easy ork skin. Here is one done purely with washes:



You'll have to use a conversion chart, as some of the paints are outdated.

One efficient way I saw was to basecoat the entire model yellow, then to wash the skin green. Double purpose being the armour is already yellow (assuming you want it yellow), and the skin gets nicely highlighted so most of the work is done with 2 steps. Was a nice tutorial in the tutorial forum here for it.

I have just posted a boy I painted up, very simple technique of:

Dark green all over flesh area,
Lighter green over that, leaving very deepest recesses dark green,
Apply a dark green wash
Highlight with light green until you are happy with the result.

Longest part of it is waiting for the wash to dry (hair dryer helps here)

If you want to know what it looks like then look at my thread. Hope it helps