Squidmar is back with another tutorial covering four different techniques for painting hair more realistically on miniatures!
Squidmar’s channel is rapidly growing due to his great tutorials ranging from full-scale models to tips, even to practical physics! Painting hair can be hard because in real life it is much more translucent than on most minis. There is no ‘right way’ but he goes over four different techniques to try out. Let’s check them out!
4 Techniques for Painting Hair On Miniatures
This is what we want to avoid! When using the old school way of painting it turns out looking more like pasta than real hair! If you love what Squidmar is up to, check out his other videos here!
First Technique
The first technique is all about the crew cut! The favorite of many Space Marines and other warriors. To start, it just has a dark brown base coat.
To make the hair more realistic, he starts with a light brown going in a circle around the head. Then goes darker and darker into the middle. So the outside is almost white and looks like it is reflecting light while the top keeps the darkest brown.
Second Technique
For the second example, he focuses on how to paint a flowing beard! Who doesn’t love a nice looking beard? Again he starts with the whole thing coated in a dark brown. If you want to use the same mini, it’s called the Bearded Yell and you can find it on Thingiverse.
He got the idea for this by looking at flowing hair and seeing how it reflects light. The insides and outsides of the curves reflect the most light in real life, so that’s the goal on the mini.
Start with the darker colors and move the light colors closer and closer to where light bounces naturally. So the lightest will be at the apex of the curves and the darkest inside. Find a reference picture to look at for this and make sure your painting just follows what naturally happens. For colors, he uses Rhinox Hide, Mornfang Brown, and Death Claw Brown.
Thrid Technique
This technique is all about long and flat hair. To start he hits it with very dark green over the whole head.
He uses a similar idea to technique one for this. Where you focus on where the light would be coming from in real life. He focuses on the general shape of the hair and not individual pieces. This gives it a more realistic feel. So basically anywhere the hair is raised or bumping out, it gets more light naturally. So those are the areas you paint lighter.
Fourth Technique
For this one, he uses a bust from his Kickstarter, which is awesome! You can still preorder the bust here, not too worry. This idea is all about pulled back hair that combines the ideas of long hair and short.
This time he imagines the light source coming from the front, pulling the viewer in. So he goes lighter in the front, darker on top, then where the hair flares up again he adds more light tones.
For this, he shows how it looks in real life on someone with a very similar haircut. You can see the light reflects from the front and looks very close to the mini.
That does it for this awesome tutorial. He really recommends finding real-life examples of similar hair. This will make the painting just that much easier. Hopefully, this helped you with some ideas on hair!
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Squidmar Miniatures is a great place to learn all kinds of painting techniques! Be sure to subscribe to Squidmar Miniatures YouTube channel for more tutorials.
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About the Author: Travis Pasch
Travis Pasch
Job Title: Head Writer & Editor
Socials: @paschbass
About Travis Pasch: Travis has been a Warhammer 40k hobbyist since the 1990s, playing the game since Third Edition. Through extensive traveling, he’s seen a lot of the miniatures hobby from across the world, giving him a unique perspective on the latest gaming topics and trends.
Travis’s brother even owns a commission painting studio, where he’s picked up a lot of good advice and techniques for painting Warhammer and tabletop miniatures over the years, as well. Travis joined the Spikey Bits team in 2019 and has been the lead writer since 2020.
Currently, he’s working on converting all his 40k Adeptus Mechanicus models and becoming a true tech enjoyer, complete with both sad and happy robot noises!
