Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Does anyone have an easy method of painting horns? I'm not talking about "centerpiece model with 15 thinned layers of bleached bone and white," more like "painting a horde of Gors."

I'd say, depending on what colour you want it to be, that you start with a base of Rakarth Flesh, then you shade with Seraphim Sepia.

snakebite leather - burbonic brown - utashi bone those are my go to horn colors
from using all three to just using two, with a tastful light flesh/sepia wash

I like Bone with a Earth wash for bones/horns. Using other off white/earth tones with Sepia or Flesh wash are other nice alternatives. A coat of Black shade can darken them. Mix some different combinations to add variety to the units so they're not all the same.

Usually, you want the bottom of the base of the horn to be darker, and the tip to be brighter. The easiest way to do this is to hold the horn in the correct orientation (so that the base is toward the ground, and the tip faces up, inasmuch as possible) and do a brownish wash (agrax, sepia, fleshshade, etc.) such that the wash pools towards the base.

If your skill level permits it, blend/layer it towards the base color towards the tip afterwards, then, if you are so inclined, blend it again with a shade up.

You can also brighten it by drybrushing, using strokes that follow the direction of the horn. If you plan to do this, it may be helpful to drybrush BEFORE doing the wash, as the wash will soften the texture let behind by the drybrush.

The GW way of doing horns is to paint triangles, which is also relatively easy, and creates an optical illusion in lieu of a true gradient/blend of some kind -- just look at pretty much any round GW horn, and you'll see what I mean.

Or just leave it after you do a wash

Well the fastest way is just paint it a bone like colour and then wash it a brown. Lots of ways of doing it, you could base white and wash sepia and then wash agrax. You could start with ushabti bone and wash devlan mud (probably don't need a sepia because ushabti bone is quite yellow to begin with). You could do Rakarth flesh as your base, which is slightly duller than ushabti bone. If you want a more grey looking bone you could mix some grey of similar brightness in to you base bone colour.

I find one of the hardest things is actually picking the colour, "bone coloured" can have varying amounts of yellow, brown, grey, white. It's very easy to accidentally pick something that clashes with the rest of your model and much harder to pick something that blends well.

If you have a bit more time, the next best thing IMO is to do a grainy finish like GW do on most of their models. For example, a Stegadon...



Talys described them as triangles but it's more long streaks. The thinner and longer you can make the streaks the better it'll look. I think you want to use at least 3 or 4 colours doing this method. Paint the horn a dark brown then do a few layers of streaks in lighter colours like a medium brown and a couple of bone colours. The mistake a lot of people make when starting out is they just paint stubby triangles a few millimetres apart in each colour as if they were highlighing/shading/blending with triangles. What you actually want to get that cool grainy effect is long thin streaks that extend almost the whole way down the horn and then the different coloured streaks should overlap for a large portion of the horn. That'll make it look like there's crevices that run the whole length of the horn.

The next level above that, in my opinion, is to do the same thing, but with much more care taken to blend the different colours you used in the streaks be using more colours and using filters/glazes in between to add more depth.

EDIT: You obviously have to take in to account the direction of the grain of the horn. The Stegadon has the grain going down the length of the horn, I think beastmen typically have the grain going across the horn, so rather than length wise streaks it would be more appropriate to do streaks across the width of the horn.

This series of videos cover horns and such a rather simple way of painting them, by GW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T43ULH2MYP4


I prefer this video though, a much more advanced look at it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPZhzIgdkS8