Kruleboyz- Part 1 - Dark Skintones

I always like to try a mix of skintones with models with bare skin. Aside being more realistic, it's just more fun to mix it up. After painting 5 of my Kruleboyz Spearhead with lighter skin, I decided to mix it up with a few, starting with dark - almost black - skin. I thought it would be interesting to document my experience. This isn't so much a tutorial, as sharing lessons I learned along the way.

A key principle with my approach to the Kruleboyz is that I wanted a consistent shade colour to tie together the variations in leather and skintones. This along with the bright blue shields lets the army have a consistent tone, but plenty of variation. You'll see the use of Scale 75 Black Leather throughout this model, but there's no reason you have to use it. Any dark burgundy or maroon colour should work, and if you wanted to to give the model a cooler tone you could opt for a dark blue, or just mix black into your dark green. I think the maroon gives a more interesting tone though. Something like Barak-Nar Burgundy, or Gal Vorbak Red would possibly work too.

I primed these in Army Forge Matt Black, then did an all over base coat of the Black Leather.

Start with a 2:1 mix of a dark green, and a burgundy or maroon. I used Citadel Nocturne Green, and Black Leather.

You can see here that the colour is almost black. From here, it's 'just' a case of gradually building up progressively brighter highlights. I decided I'd do this using Citadel Rakarth Flesh. This proved an interesting challenge with the face I was painting. It proved quite hard to get my highlights exactly where I wanted them.

Here you can see the first layer of highlights. I was reasonably happy with it already at this stage - I'm usually not too precise at this point, as it's just about capturing the broad highlights I want to place.

Gradually building up further, I started to feel like I needed to place some of the other colours I wanted to get a better feel for the shape of the face. The lower lips on orks often looks good in an alternative to the main flesh colour - in this case, I opted for using Citadel Screamer Pink. As usual, I mixed in some Black Leather for the base coat below.

Not yet content, I felt I needed to see the teeth.

It's at this point I decided on something radical - I felt like it needed to look more blended. I mixed up a wash of the base coat, and applied. In the end, I felt like this was probably a mistake - the highlights ended up disappearing too much. I probably should have thinned more, or opted to glaze into the recesses.

Finally, the eyes. An off-white (Citadel Pallid Wych Flesh), followed by a red for the iris (Citadel Khorn Red), and I decided that for now I would move onto the rest of the model. Next up, we'll have the leather.

Today's listening: