Painting tusks in 28mm

I’ve painted the skin of the Mournfang now. I haven’t written anything about that because I’m not sure I’m very happy with it yet. It’s very blue and quite bright which isn’t exactly what I wanted. I’m going to paint the tusks (painting tusks in 28mm isn’t something I’ve done before), the teeth, the noses and the eyes of the Mournfang and see if I need to adjust the skin tone after that.

Painting tusks in 28mm – reference material

The first thing I did before painting tusks in 28mm was to look at as many pictures as I could of different animals tusks. The Mournfang aren’t mammoths, the shape of their tusks looks more like those of warthogs than anything else. So I did a lot of research of warthog tusks. Actually the best image I found was on a site which sells bones. I won’t link it here because it’s gross. My point is that when you’re painting tusks in 28mm (or anything else for that matter) you should have some idea of what you want it to end up looking like before you start (and that’s where reference material comes in).

Painting tusks in 28mm – what am I trying to achieve?

So breaking down the tusk into colour areas and shapes is actually pretty simple. The tusk is a basic yellow colour. At the bottom (where it joins the skull) it is dark brown and then all over but most densely towards the tip it has some white staining. All of this feels very achievable.

Painting tusks in 28mm – grabbing some paint.

Alright, here are the three colours I picked;

• ‘Buff,’ from Vallejo Model Color for the basic yellow tone. My reference material shows that it’s a pale yellow and quite desaturated that makes up the bulk of the tusk. Don’t go picking lemon yellow here (unless that’s what you’re after)
• ‘Charred Brown,’ from Vallejo Game Air for the darker shade. This was a more subtle choice than the yellow. My reference material shows the dark brown as being quite cold (probably because it’s a photo of dead tusks not on a living animal) but I like it anyway. I wanted to use Dryad Bark (which is a brown purple and very cold) but don’t have any so I grabbed this which is pretty close
• ‘Wraithbone,’ from Citadel. Again, from the reference material it’s obvious that the white colouring on tusks is white relative to the yellow. It’s not white like your freshly washed cotton bed sheets. Wraithbone is an off white with some pink and grey to it and looks good against the Buff.

Painting tusks in 28mm – Step One

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Step one is pretty straightforward. It’s two thin coats of the Buff over all of the tusk

Step 2

Step two is a bit more interesting. I think my Charred Brown way down and painted a decent amount of it onto the tusk where it joins the skull. Then I cleaned my brush (by ‘cleaned,’ I mean, ‘sucked,’) so it was wet but had no paint on it and voided the brown paint up the tusks towards the tip as if I was wet blending but really I was just pushing one colour in one direction and letting it fade out. After that I went back over the bottom of the tusks with the Charred Brown to get the base of the tusks really dark and to push the transition. Here’s how it looked:

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Step three

When I look at my reference material, I can see that some of the dark colour at the base of the tusk actually runs all the way along the tusk to the tip. Step three was to add these lines:

Step 4

Step 4 was to dry brush Wraithbone very lightly over the tusk so that it was left on the model but didn’t cover the dark lines:

Step 5

Step five is easy. Take a group photo and breathe a sigh of relief that with the tusks painted, the skin on the Mournfang doesn’t look so weird.

So what’s next?

I’ve done six of these, I have a further six to do. Then I want to paint the rest of the faces (the eyes, noses, teeth) before I move back on to the Ogors themselves and probably have a crack at the cloth on their trousers.

Comments always welcome!