Tutorial: Painting Ork Skin

Hey everyone,

So I decided to sit down and rock out a little bit of a surprise tutorial for you all! This one is a little bit simpler than my regular painting, but I think it achieves its intended job as well as being extremely quick! So here’s how I’ve been painting Ork skin:

So my key trick to my style of painting is Overbrushing. I do it on my tanks to achieve the rich gold brown, I do it on my Guardsmen’s clothing to layer it quickly before doing a final careful highlight, and I do it on, well, Orks!

Step 1) Base the skin with Orkhide Flesh. I know it seems like a “No Duh!” kind of thing, but I’ve found that it works the best with both tone and coverage. Don’t be afraid of getting a little on the clothing or the armour, as you’ll end up just painting over it later.

Step 2) Mix a little amount of Orkhide Flesh and Snot Green in a 1:1 ratio. This is what the mix should look like:

If you want a lighter tone, mix in more Snot Green or even Goblin Green, and if you want a dark tone, mix in Orkhide Flesh or even Dark Angels Green.

Using a stiff brush, overbrush the skin with the mix.

I know it doesn’t look like much in my picture, but you’ll be able to see it when you paint it on. It leaves the base in the deepest recesses and picks out the higher points on things like the face and the muscles.

Step 3) Overbrush Snot Green over the skin. Do this step with a little care, focusing on the higher areas. The reason I don’t drybrush it on is that it won’t provide the total coverage I want on the skin.

After this point, you can go in a couple directions. You can mix Goblin Green and Snot Green and drybrush it over the highest points, such as the nose, cheeks, and knuckles. For the paints I have for the commission, I mixed a little Snot Green and Dheneb Stone and drybrushed it over the high areas. The key thing with Orks is that since there’s so freaking many of them, a little variety is good for them! Play with mixtures, different techniques and test your abilities. Here’s what the first group of Gretchin looks like after using this technique, applied with my other methods:

The Yellow is done using my same method in my “Painting Chevrons” tutorial found here, and I’ll do a tutorial on my Beaten Ork Metals before I finish them all.

Granesh

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