How I paint miniatures. Part Two; Layering. Bone

Hello! This is part two of my series on how I paint miniatures. Part one (prepping models) is here. This post is one of two that will look at my method for layering. The first few of these will focus on painting different elements of the Morgue Miniatures model ‘Catrina.’ She’s actually quite handy for this series on how I paint miniatures because she has two elements that are common to fantasy wargaming; Bone (she’s a skeleton) and flesh (actually she doesn’t have any flesh but that’s how I’ll be painting her dress).

The first post on layering will cover Bone. I will counsel here that it took me about an hour to paint the very small amount of bone on Catrina so my method is not quick and wouldn’t help you paint an army in time for a tournament in the next ten years but you might still get some hints.

Ok, as a reminder, here is Catrina after she’s been prepped for painting:

Catrina is a tiny model so apologies, in general, for the quality of my photos but here goes. Here is how I paint miniatures; Layering. Bone.

My assumption here is that you’ve spent some time thinking about the final result you want. I used to be the kind of painter that just sat down and picked up colours and started painting. That’s why, for years, my colour choices were pretty terrible. Now I go through a fairly long process of choosing an aesthetic for modelling projects (you can find some of them here and here and here for example).

If you don’t know how you want your miniature to look when it’s finished, there’s no point being disappointed with in when it’s done – you don’t know how it’s meant to look so maybe that’s precisely right!

I wanted Catrina to have a desert bleached bone look (the webstore at Morgue references The Day of the Dead so suggests a Mexican backstory which would add weight to the desert look). if you want to go a different way for your bone, that’s fine. Adjust the colours to suit you – the technique remains the same.

Stage One: The basecoat

Very simple stage this one. I just took a pre mixed bone colour from my collection and painted a thin layer over all of the bone areas. When it was dry, I repeated it. I chose Wraithbone by Citadel because it’s quite a cool, very white colour. Skeletons are dead, kind of, I guess. I like Wraithbone because it’s quite bleached and flat. Lots of pre mixed bone colours are actually quite vibrant and I don’t find them that useful for bone, I think they’re more useful for adding to colours to get a highlight mix (instead of using white which can get quite chalky).

Anyway, that’s a lot of words to say two thin coats of Wraithbone. One it’s done, here she is:

Stage Two: Glazing the shadows

Now that the basecoat is on, the next stage ion how I paint miniatures when I’m layering is to introduce the shadows. The first one was a thinned down (just with water) glaze into everywhere except the highlights with Citadel Seraphim Sepia. This wash is quite red, has a lot of colour in it but is also quite weak so not too overpowering. It reinforces the light / dark value sketch put in place during prepping but also introduces some colour. Two coats and Catrina was looking like this:

Step two is to take a darker shadow colour and introduce this in a more focused way towards the darker areas. I picked a Vallejo Game Ink Skin Wash and darkened it with Citadel Agrax Earthshade and the whole thing was thinned. Two coats of that and things are really starting to move

As you do this, you might find that the different steps don’t look much different. And that’s kind of the point. How I paint miniatures is to make small adjustments to the colour, several times, in thin glazes and layers. This gives lots of depth to the finish and makes the colours more vibrant. You’ll also have seen that I repeat each stage at least twice. This is fundamental to how I paint miniatures. A small amount of paint, in a thin layer, repeated multiple times.

So what comes next? You guessed it. My final glazed shadow colour in the most dark areas of the bone. I went for straight Agrax Earthshade from Citadel and thinned it. Two layers. Here she is after that:

This is Catrina in all of her shadowy glory. If you’ve done two layers of each step then you can leave the shadows here. I did two layers but even so I went further and repeated this entire stage again, just to make sure I had depth in each area of the shadows.

Stage Three: Layered highlights

So the first two stages of how I paint miniatures; layering is to get a solid basecoat down and progressively deeper shadows. Once those are all laid out, it’s time to work back up to highlights.

Again, to reiterate, I don’t really like pre mixed bone colours. I don’t think most of them look like bone, if you study reference material. So my highlights will be light grey. There doesn’t need to be a lot of colour in the highlights, there’s a lot of colour in the shadows and there’s also not a lot of room on the model so I don’t want to add too much complexity.

One light grey highlight later and Catrina is looking pretty cool:

The next step won’t surprise you if you’ve been following. This is a lighter highlight colour applied more selectively to the highest highlight points:

Ok she’s really starting to look slick now. The final step? You guessed it. Repeat both the highlight stages again.

Again, apologies for the photographs. TEH clearly needs a new camera! What I’ve got after all of this is a bone colour which is colourful and vibrant in the shadows and cold and bleached in the highlights. I’m really pleased with it. The next post in this series will be on layering the dress to look like skin.

Comments always welcome (except on the camera work. I’m already done with your comment if it’s about how bad my photos are).