Squidmar is back with another tutorial showing us his professional painting secrets and how to make your minis amazing!
Squidmar’s channel is rapidly growing due to his great tutorials ranging from full-scale models to tips, even to practical physics! This time around he goes through a ton of professional painting tips to turn your minis into works of art.
Let’s check out the tips! Just to note, the video is a little over an hour so we’ll highlight a bunch of the tips, but be sure to check out the whole video below to hear all his secrets.
Professional Painting Secrets: Squidmar Tutorial
For this one, he uses a bust from his Kickstarter, which is awesome! You can still order the bust here, not too worry and this is the end result we’re going for! Let’s see how he does it.
Airbrushing/Priming
He starts with a white undercoat and hits the whole thing with a top-down angel, you can do this with either a can or the airbrush.
Skin Tone
He starts with Bugman’s glow and airbrushes all the skin on the bust. To start highlighting he hits all the muscles in a natural tone, where you connect everything instead of just making everything into an island of its own. Then break out your brush and start with thinned-down paint and hit highlights from a source of light from above. Start with the Bugman’s and keep going lighter and lighter as your highlights go further. He uses Cadian Flesh as his second highlight and mixes it with the Bugman’s. Just keep the light source in mind and this means the highlights shouldn’t be in the center of the muscles.
The face doesn’t have as many sharp contrasts as the rest of the body, so try to make your layers smoother here.
OSL
He starts with Vallejo Skurvy Green as the base coat for his OSL. He uses an airbrush here, but you can do it with a regular brush as well. You want to feather the spraying so some does hit the muscles. He does this first so he can finish the skin.
Finishing the Skin
First, he goes over where some of the muscle areas that are pointing towards the sky were hit with the green. He mixes Flat Flesh with Cadian Flesh to start his proper highlights. He just tries to get a decent amount of good layers here, slowly moving your mix to just Flat Flesh. He then adds a sunny skin tone to the mix for his final highlights until it is mainly the brightest color. But just be sure to only highlight the smallest areas with the brightest color. He does a lot of small layers here, so just take your time and be patient and make sure to connect all the muscle layers.
Base Coats
For the leather he uses Rhinox Hide, The hair with Rhinox Hide mixed with Mournfang Brown, the Metallics with Dark Sea Blue, and the Squid is painted with Trollslayer Orange.
Painting the Leather
He uses three main colors to paint the leather, Rhinox Hide, Deathclaw Brown, and Doombull Brown. The Doombull Brown is the first highlight. He almost always uses stippling when painting leather, so he also does that here. Then he mixes in Deathclaw Brown to the Doombull and does a smaller highlight. Finally, he does a mix with mainly Deathclaw brown for about 10% of the surface and finishes with the sunny skin tone mini highlight.
Painting the Hair
He mixes Dark Sea Blue with Bugman’s in a wash style. He paints all around the freshly shaved part of the head. To highlight he starts with a stippling of Deathclaw Brown and then does tiny dots with the Cadian Flesh in dots around the other dots. For the actual hair, he starts with Doombull Brown and follows the shape of the hair, not painting individual hairs. For the second layer, he mixes in some Deathclaw Brown and finishes that highlight off with just Deathclaw brown. To finish the hair, he does ivory on the front of the hair.
Painting the Armor/Dagger
He starts with Elysian Green and Dark Sea Green mixed together over the base coat as a highlight. He slowly moves this to just Elysian Green as the highlight. For the bracer, he follows the shape of the part and the light source, with the same colors as the other armor. He follows the same highlight pattern but does this fully based on how the light hits it. For this he wants visible brush strokes, so don’t make it too blended. To finish it he adds in some ivory for the final highlight. To paint the dagger he uses the same process as he did for the bracer except he finishes it with a Rhinox Hide wash in the middle.
Professional Painting Secrets for the Squid
Put Trollslayer Orange, Lugganeth Orange, and Ivory into your wet palette. Keep highlighting with lighter and lighter and colors in layers where the light source is hitting the squid. Just try to think of where a sea creature would be hit by the light. To finish the highlights, he glazes over the highlights with Flashgitz Yellow. Then he glazes in the shadows with Screamer Pink to bring in the shadows without taking out the vibrancy. To do the eyes, he does the same colors and process as the armor.
OSL Highlight
He already created the base of this with the airbrush, but now to highlight it. Start with Scurvy green and Liver Green and hit the highlight from a bottom source of light, because that’s where the green is coming from. Just keep moving lighter and lighter to the smaller you go with your highlights here. He also does the same thing on his hands as well.
The Eyes
Keep your arms very stabilized here to start. Then take Doombull Brown and hit the whole eyes. After that dries use Rakarth flesh in a smaller area, this should take about three passes. To finish add 50% white to the Rakarth Flesh. For the pupils, he uses the same colors as the armor and goes brighter and brighter towards the bottom. For the actual pupil, he does a very light black and creates a circle. To finish it off, he adds white and does a small light source to make it more realistic.
Gold
This is the final piece to finish the bust. First, put Scrofulous Brown, Sun Yellow, and Ivory onto your wet palette. You want to highlight the shape of the item that you’re painting and then connect the shape with the light source by using your highlight. The lighter you go on the highlight, the smaller and smaller area you cover. The placement for gold is the most important, so make sure all of your highlights make sense with the light source.
Finished Mini using Squidmar’s Professional Painting Secrets
That does it for this awesome tutorial. He really recommends finding real-life examples of lighting or this can get hard. Hopefully, this helped you get your power swords, skin tones, leathers etc looking magnificent!
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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!
