Painting: Freehand Nurgle emblem

[Squiggoth]

I whipped up this tutorial on how I do freehands on my shoulderpads for the guys at Deathguard.org .... might be useful to non-DG Marine players as well, so here goes:

 

Step 1

Paint the shoulderpad in the basic colour (in this case Rotting Flesh with Skull White highlights)

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a285/squiggothnurgle/Plaguemarines/Freehand001s.jpg

 

Step 2

Draw the basic shape of your freehand with a darkish colour. In this case, I wanted a Mark of Nurgle made from skulls with three "linking beams" and I used Codex Grey for the skulls and Catachan Green for the beams.

Don't worry too much about getting the correct shape, that'll be fixed later.

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a285/squiggothnurgle/Plaguemarines/Freehand002s.jpg

 

Step 3

Fill in the shapes, and try to get more definition into the drawing ... In this case I used Bronzed Flesh to "flesh out" the skull shape. I also roughly dotted the eye sockets and nasal hole thingy with black.

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a285/squiggothnurgle/Plaguemarines/Freehand003s.jpg

 

Step 4

Start tidying up. Here I used Bleached Bone to make the eyes and nose more neat, and to make the shape of the skull look sharp.

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a285/squiggothnurgle/Plaguemarines/Freehand004s.jpg

 

Step 5

Final highlights, here with Skull White. Now the skulls look like skulls.

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a285/squiggothnurgle/Plaguemarines/Freehand005s.jpg

 

Step 6

Now I add some highlights to the "linking beams", and draw a black line around the freehand because I like the look of dark lines.

You can see that I got sloppy here and there, so the black line is quite thick in places. No worries, that'll be fixed in Step 7.

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a285/squiggothnurgle/Plaguemarines/Freehand006s.jpg

 

Step 7

Tidy up the black lines with your shoulderpad colour.

The tidying up is not completely done yet, but this is more or less the way I do my freehands in 90% of the cases. :)

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a285/squiggothnurgle/Plaguemarines/Freehand007s.jpg

 

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a285/squiggothnurgle/Plaguemarines/IconWhiteSquad001s.jpg

 

 

*edit* ... Writing "much" with a "g" is a bit dumb. :wink:

[Marovingean]

That's really useful! Cheers man!

 

M

[KAINE-77]

Excellent tutorial!

 

You've made it seem so staight forward and simple... Now I'm having delusions of grandeur, and am gonna try freehand on my marines! :blush:

[Tyrannicide]

Cool tutorial, just as Duma said, you made it look very simple to do.