Of White and Washes

I love the Citadel washes from GW. They are a great improvment from the old inks they produced and can be used for various effects to make an average painter like myself look better than I really am. This little guide will show one method to do just that as well as paint lots of models very quickly.

It all comes down to starting with a white undercoat. You need it to be a smooth as possible for the best results. I used the GW skull white spray paint for the models shown here and must admit the undercoat could have been better had I had more time and better conditions to do these with.

The four Tyranid models below have all been undercoated white and then had 3 layers of different GW inks applied to them to paint their skin tone. The top model's use Leviathan Purple and Ogryn Flesh and the bottom two use Baal Red and Thraka Green. You can use more or less layers to get darker or lighter shades. I am going to use the purple and blue colour scheme to paint my newly aquired Trygon.



Just by applying laters of GW washes over white can produce some really good results and not just for Tyranids either. This space marines armour from my Spartan Space Marine Army has had 3 layers of Sepia wash over his armour to give it that tan colour.



Using the washes in this way gives you automatic shading for your armour or alien skin which means you can paint that Tyranid horde a lot quicker and still maintain a very good table top standard.