Drybrushing bone. Any good schemes and tricks?

[Xalden the soul seer]

Greetings everyone.

I am thinking of drybrushing my bone rather than my normal Base-wash-Highlight-glaze method for everything else.
The reason is that I find bone quite annoying to paint and it always looks too clean for zombies and skellies IMO. (I mean remember the old 6th skellie paint job by the eavy metal team. Way to bright and clean for skellies IMO).

So I come to ask some advice on good schemes and tricks to drybrush ing bone but still get it to tie in well with my: Base-wash-Highlight-glaze methods I will use for the non bone areas? I.e keeping the model nicely painted.

cheers.

 

[The Dark Sheep]

What advice I can give can be found here. It might be a bit too clean for your tastes though.

 

[Fallen Angel]

I do my bones like this:

1 Bestial Brown
2 Drybrush Bubonic brown
3 Drybrush Bleached bone
4 Highlight skull white

 

[M.Deadman21]

I have actually used dark sheep's totorial for all my skelletons, I thought i went great(dont have any photos yet), how bright they come up is up to you, you could do a dark wash after the dry brushing to make it quite dark or only do a light dry brush over the browns.

 

[Tall]

I've just finished doing some Skeletons, all I did was white primer, Devlan Mud wash, and drybrush Bleached Bone. It's incredibly simple but IMO produces good results really, really quickly. If you then paint up the armour, shields, detailing etc in a marginally high standard it draws the eye away from the fact that the bone was done so quickly. Of course this is just how I do them because I'm a lazy painter

 

[Capt Rubber Ducky]

I did my skellys by drybrushing (soory for the rubish pic):

They we're basecoated Black then drybrushed Khemri brown then drybrushed bleached bone, and finished off with a black wash

 

[LevDaddy]

@Everyone, I seem to have the biggest problem on my final coat, be it a highlight/drybrush, wash or pure coat. Any tips? I end up completely changing the way my skeletons look, for the worse.

If drybrushing, are you drybrushing all the bone, including the flatter, more open areas - or just joints, ribs, facial areas etc. And how much paint are you using?

If washing, again, are you washing the entire bone areas? I tried that with a watered-down wash and it made the entire model look all cruddy.

Any tips will be quite welcome.

 

[Bug16]

If drybrushing, are you drybrushing all the bone, including the flatter, more open areas - or just joints, ribs, facial areas etc. And how much paint are you using?

Basically, you need to have *very* little paint on your brush to drybrush. Literally put a bit of paint on your brush then wipe/brush most of it off onto a piece of kitchen paper.

I drybrush the entire model very lightly, i.e. don't press the brush hard on the model, a few times because it's better to get a few thin drybrushes onto the model than one thick drybrush on it. I use a decent sized sable brush for this, I find sable brushes are much softer when drybrushing rather than using non-sable brushes.

The imporant thing to remember when drybrushing, this isn't obvious when you first do it, is to brush across the detail. I.e. pretend the lines below are the ribs, brush down the ribs:

ribs drybrush direction
---- |
---- |
---- V

When you're brushing your figure look at where the detail is and brush accordingly otherwise you can end up drybrushing paint into the recesses by accident.

If washing, again, are you washing the entire bone areas? I tried that with a watered-down wash and it made the entire model look all cruddy.

It sounds like you're not adding enough water to the ink. By watered down (bear in mind I'm thinking off the top of my head) start by adding 5 brushes of water to 1 brush of ink then mix it all together on your painting palette. If it still looks too thick add another brush of water to it.

At the end of the day you're going to have to practice a few times before you get your technique sorted.