Dark Eldar Step-by-Step Part 2: Clothing & Armour

Hi everyone!

Welcome to Part 2 of the Dark Eldar Succubus step by step. If you want to see part 1, where I show how I painted the skin, please go HERE.

So before we start the step by step, I wanted to show the current “state” of the mini :).

For this part of the series, I will show you how I painted the black clothing and the green armour parts. I hope you will enjoy this step-by-step. If you have any questions, please let me know.

Some readers have asked me what dilutions I use for my painting. This is a difficult question to answer, as it depends on what parts I am painting, what colours and what effect I am going for. In general I like to use a layering technique, but sometimes I also use wet-on-wet blending.

From left to right, I mostly use these dilutions for each technique: painting the basecoat, layering and smoothing out the transitions with glazes.

Clothing

Before I start blocking in the basecoat, I like to blackline the areas surrounding the skin. Depending on the mini I am working on, I use pure black (usually for a more comical look) or a very dark brown or grey. For this mini I used pure Chaos Black from GW (old colour).  In the picture it looks like the blacklining is very thick. In fact, It is very thin, because I don’t want it to be too strong. By place most o my brush on the parts that still need to be painted I can get a thin line, the thicker part will cover areas that still need to be painted anyway.

 From left to right, these are:

• Chaos Black (GW, old colour)
• Dark Reaper (GW)
• Shadow Grey (GW, old colour)
• Basic Skin Tone (Vallejo)
• White (Vallejo)

Third Highlight
I added a tiny bit of white to the previous mix. I think about 1 part white to 3 parts of the second highlight mix. I painted this on very small areas of the chest, the straps, and the knee.

I smoothed out the layers using dilutions of all the mixes used before. I also darked the underside of the straps a bit as they became too bright for my taste,

Spot Highlighting & Shading
In this step I added tiny dots of highlights on the chest and the chest straps by adding a little bit of white to the previous highlight mix. I blended them in using the third highlight colour.

Then I used a dilution of pure black (glaze consistency, see above) and shaded areas that I wanted to become darker.

That is it for the clothing. On the pictures the highlights appear a bit chalky, in reality you don’t see this I think it is the light bouncing of the white particles. I think I will try to smooth out this parts a bit more to try to get rid of this.

Middle part of chest


For lack of a better word, this is shortly how I painted the middle parts of the chest – the ribbons. You can see the result in the picture above. It was too tiny to get it on picture perfect for a complete SBS.

Basecoat: I painted the basecoat in Gorthor Brown (GW).
Wash: I washed the whole piece with Devlan Mud (GW).
Highlights: Then I painted the top of the ribbons with Gorthor Brown + Pale sand (Vallejo), ratio 1:1.
Shading: I painted the shadows (deeper part of ribbons) with Chocolate Brown (Vallejo)
Spot highlight: I added tiny fots of highlights using pure pale sand


As the area is so tiny, I didn’t feel the need to smooth out any blends.

Green armour


Before I start with this part os the SBS, I want to express my apologies for the pictures. My camera has a lot of difficulties of making pictures of green (and blue too) colours. Hopefully the text will speak for itself 🙂

For the Green armour I wanted to try something. I decided to use the colours that Games Workshop suggests on their Dark Eldar armour, but to paint it in quite a different way. I said before I don’t like only edge highlighted areas, so instead I tried my own style using their palette choice (sort of).

Basically I wanted to prove that using the same colour palette you can create very different results!

I used the following palette:

• Chaos Black (GW, old colour)
• Incubi darkness (GW, base colour)
• Kabalite Green (GW, layer colour)
• Sybarite Green (GW, layer colour)
• Gauss Blaster Green (GW, edge paint) 
• White (Vallejo)

Second Highlight
I used a mix of 50% kabalite green and 50% sybarite green to paint the next highlight. In the picture you can clearly see the layers of the highlights. The transitions will be smoothed out later 🙂

Third Highlight & Fourth Highlight
On even smaller areas I painted the third highlight colour which was pure sybarite green. I started to edge highlight raised areas with a mix of 50% sybarite green and 50% gauss glaster green. A little note on the guass blaster green. GW refers to this colour as an “edge paint”. But to me it works like any other colour. It is not comparable to the horrendous “dry painting” colours they also sell.

I applied an even smaller edge highlight using pure gauss blaster green.

Spot Highlight
Using a mix of gauss blaster green (2 parts) and 1 part white I painted spot highlights on just the tiniest places, for example on the very top of the armour plates above the knee.

First shadow
Using diluted Incubi darkness I painted the first shadow layer, keeping sure that I do not cover all the basecolour.

Final shadow & Smoothing
The final shadow was painted with pure chaos black, also very diluted.
After that it was time for extensive smoothing! I think that was the part of the painting of the armour that took the longest. But it is also a lot of fun 🙂

This is what the armour looked like at the end:

Pfeww!!! That was a long post! I hope you didn’t suffer from the too-long-didn’t-read syndrome!

I hope you enjoyed following me in this part of the paintjob :). Please let me know if anything is unclear. And I hope to see you in the next part!