[Chapter Six] Elephants!!!

As promised, I had some fun painting elephants. In the many armies I own (historical and others) I have never before painted these beasts. When I thought about it I just imagined "grey".
The thing was when I faced them with my brush in hand. They would look like statues of elephants if I did them the way I intended. I didn´t want a rocky finish, nor a clean "horse like" one.
So I developed my own technique. Keep in mind these are my first attempts. I have two more to paint so I still have time to experiment.
Take a look at the pics and then I´ll tell you how I painted them.

Here´s one of them:






And here´s the other. The light roman troops are from Hat´s Roman Catapults set. I knew those figures would come in handy.






And here you have both, side by side. Unless you play a DBA Big Battle you will not see them like this on the battlefield :)




So, onto the painting process.

For the basecoat I used a very dark grey color, it´s called Antracita here. Really dark, no "blueish" tone whatsoever. After that I went with drybrush. You know this plastic minis have a very smooth surface. Metal minis usually have some texture, no matter how hard they try to make the part smooth. I don´t know if I´m making myself clear here. The point is that I did a very very detailed drybrush. By that I mean I used a small brush and went from a dark grey to a very light one. I did like 5 or 6 steps of grey (from dark to light)

This gave me a clean picture of the texture of the model and easily defined the bright areas. But it was too clean!! I mean, this thing should be dirty. And not just "mud dirty". It´s skin should look old, even though we use quite bright colors due to the small size of the minis.

So I just splat brown ink all over the model. Just like when you weather a tank model. Brown ink with a little bit of water. I let this dry overnight.

Now I had a very dirty elephant. It´s skin however, was very real. This is when I grabbed the brush, made (I mix my colors) a grey that was almost as bright as the brightest highlight (after ink that is), and started doing some freehand work, just like when I paint horses. After that I did two highlights, the last one being almost pure white and just for very small details. The two elephants being different in pose was great because I did not repeat the designs on their skins.

After that a last wash with very dilluted brown ink (almost all water, mind you), painted the tusks and the rest of the accesories.

Hope you found this useful. I really enjoyed painting this models and am looking forward to the next two.

Cheers!!!