How to Paint ‘Nasty’ Flesh

Want to know how we achieve that gross, slick, wet look on our studio painted miniatures? Look no further - Marcus, from the crew, wrote a whole tutorial way back before he joined the team, and was still a subscriber!

Putrid, nasty, diseased, oozing, gruesome, wet flesh. Not rotting, not decaying, but the kind that when you see it, you know something’s not right.

I’ve built the following technique for what I call ‘nasty flesh’ over the past couple years. It's not entirely optimised for speed or efficiency, but it’s structured in such a way that each step is fun and rewarding.

Most of my painting follows a similar approach to what’s outlined below, whether it’s flesh, fabric, terrain or bases, but for now rest assured you can shuffle around your colour choices, skip the gloss effects and get some cohesive results no matter your subject.

Gear List

For this tutorial I'm using one of our Web Cocoons of model from the Remade Part 1 Collection, here's a quick rundown of the paints I'm using - 

• Army Painter Air Primer - Matte Black & White
• Any White suitable for Drybrushing
• Guilliman Flesh - Citadel
• Flayed One Flesh - Citadel (or any Ivory suitable for drybrushing)
• Carroburg Crimson - Citadel
• Druchii Violet - Citadel
• Athonian Camoshade - Citadel
• Nuln Oil - Citadel
• Vallejo Airbrush Colour Varnish - Matte & Gloss
• Blood for the Blood God - Citadel
• Nurgle’s Rot - Citadel

Plenty other brands are available - you can get the same results with different manufacturers!

Let's dive into it - 

From a clean Zenithal to Wet n’ Sweaty.

Step 1: Zenithal Basecoat

Zenithal Basecoat – For your health.

I start off every project with an initial Zenithal Basecoat fired through my airbrush. It’s a super useful technique for laying down an initial shadow layer that remains visible on the finished piece, saving you having to figure out painting the shadows yourself.

Further, a lowkey benefit of Zenithal with this painting technique is it shows you the areas of the miniature you can sack off entirely with little concern. For a lazy painter like me, getting effective results in as short a time as possible is key, and as such I don’t want to be spending time carefully painting the perfect armpit, which I’ll probably never look at again – With a Zenithal basecoat, those areas stay dark, and the later glazes won’t have a major impact.

Step 2: Drybrush White

Incremental changes.

Next, we’re going to quickly drybrush white over the zenithal basecoat, this brightens things up a little more and most importantly, brings some edge detail into the areas left pure black by the Zenithal. This is all about giving us opportunities for when we reach the later steps.

As this is a relatively flat-topped model, you’ll see that this step isn’t doing much, but worth mentioning regardless, as it’s much more relevant for miniatures with a more complex shape.

For some general advice, keep it light, I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve been a overzealous with my drybrushing and rendered the Zenithal Basecoat utterly pointless…

Step 3: Contrast/Glaze Basecoat

With the Zenithal and Drybrush complete, we’ll move to a basecoat of contrast paint, in this case, I’m using Guilliman Flesh.

As I want a pallid, light fleshtone for the finished piece, I’m only applying a single layer of contrast (multiple thin coats increases intensity), using a wet-ish brush, I move the paint around to prevent too much pooling.

Step 4: Ivory Drybrush

Once the contrast has dried, I go back in for yet another drybrush, this time with an off-white or Ivory colour. In this case, I’m using Flayed One Flesh from Citadel.

There’s no need to be too neat at this stage, I’m slapping on a rough coat all over the model, but lightly enough so as not to completely compromise the effects of the prior contrast step.

From here on out, we’re only going to darken the piece, so now is the time to think ahead about how bright you want the highlights of your finished piece to look. Don’t be afraid to go back in for a second, or third layer of drybrushing if you’re concerned the overall finish will be too dark.

I find this Ivory Drybrush step is really useful across a whole bunch of projects, aside from a few edge cases like strong, specific colours (blues, purples etc.). I’ll use this technique to bring out edge details even on dark colours like blacks, browns, reds or greens, then tinting with glazes & shades. It’s about the laziest alternative to edge highlighting I can think of, and that’s great, because I hate doing edge highlighting.

Step 5: Red Wash

Gettin’ Fleshy.

Now we’re getting into the fun stuff – working with shades and washes.

With the prior steps complete, we’ve got a really strong canvas to build our shades and washes on. For flesh, I always start with the ‘key’ tone, in this case, I’m using Carroburg Crimson, it’s a nice, earthy red that brings warmth into the piece while nicely complementing the pale skin tone we want to keep in the extreme highlights.

Contrary to popular wisdom, I’d suggest you don’t coat the whole piece in shade paint, instead, focus on the cracks and crevices. You want to leave yourself some space for later decisions – Shades aren’t particularly strong or vivid and we’ll be using plenty more, so it’s best to leave space for them to work on their own and give you an interesting variation of hue in the finished piece.

The finish I’m after is best described by the image above, as you can see, the eggs and high points of the cocooned bodies haven’t been touched by the wash. That’s going to give us plenty of space to make decisions later, and further, it’s adding a tonal variation that helps draw the eye towards the parts of the piece you want the viewer to focus on.

Step 6: Purple Wash

It’s all about that colour complexity, baby.

Next, we’re going to augment the red by adding some colour complexity and hue variation, using a purple wash – Druchii Violet Shade in my case.

Very similar to the previous step, we’re only building the purple into the crevices, this time covering less surface area than the red, as a rough benchmark, you want to be hitting only 50% of the red areas with purple wash, focusing on extreme crevices and leaving room for the purple to fade into the red.

What you’ll also see here, is those untouched areas are starting to look much brighter and more defined than before. This is one of the key things to keep in mind with this technique, as we aren’t doing any highlighting, you’re introducing darkness and shadow to make the bright areas feel brighter.

Step 7: Green Shade

Green is the key.

Now is the point where things really start heating up. Between the red and purple, we’ve got a really solid finish, and depending on what you’re after, you could actually finish shading here and move onto the varnish and gloss work but, what’s the point in doing anything if you’re not going to massively over-egg it? (pun not entirely intended…)

We’re moving into the green, I’ve seen this tip knocking around before but it generally seems to slip under the radar for most folks as it’s a bit non-obvious. It’s something my old art teacher taught me back at school when was I was learning portraiture – Human skin, no matter the hue, always has a bit of green in it, just a touch, but like most uncanny-valley style issues, the viewer will pick up on it if it’s missing. Have a look at your own arm, around veins and on smoother areas in particular, you should see a smidge of green in there.

I’m using Athonian Camoshade from Citadel, applied in broad patches. Like prior steps, you don’t want to coat the whole model, instead, focus on creating patches where you’re feeling the un-shaded surface is looking a bit boring. We’re nearing the end now, and I’d probably recommend you only want about 10% of the original drybrush coat left untouched for extreme highlights.

While less obvious on darker skin tones due to the strength of pigment, the technique still has a lot of value, while difficult to spot, I’ll share a few ‘healthier’ skin tone examples below as they’re a better illustration of my point than a filthy sack of flesh spider eggs…

Handsome Behektur here was painted using the same steps I’ve outlined in this post, with a thin layer of Wyldwood Contrast after the Guilliman Flesh. You can see some of the green on his upper abs and around the cheeks.

Believe it or not, these two Tormentor Cult Bruisers also have some green wash on their skin - check around the belly on the rightmost fella.

Anyway,onto the next step – nearly there folks!

Step 8: Black Shade

This final wash is all about adding more definition and sickly pallour.

To finish off the shading, we’re going to be adding some black. In this case, I’m using Nuln Oil from Citadel.

We’re going to be applying it for two specific and distinct goals, firstly, to add a bit more nastiness to the green patches, and secondly, to build yet more definition into the core shapes.

So step one, I’m adding splotches of black shade to the centre of the green patches, in my mind, these are the shadows of the embryo/pupae growing in the egg sacks, but visually speaking it’s really just adding some more complexity to the greens.

If I’m trying to paint a ‘healthier’ subject, I’ll usually skip this step, and move straight to outlining with black shade between different textures, like where clothing meets skin, or chainmail meets cloth for example.

Step two, I’m hitting the extreme crevices and key object outlines. One downside of this painting style is that things can look a bit muddy when you get to the end. My first port of call when I’m concerned about this is to bring out the key forms of the sculpt using black. If you’re feeling like the problem needs a major fix, I’ll sometimes bring out the big guns and use Black Templar Contrast, or even a black layer paint for a stronger intensity and more dramatic result, all that being said, keep it subtle to begin with, sometimes a second pass with the shade paint is enough and you don’t want to risk compromising the overall finish with heavy-handed correction.

And with that, you can breath a sigh of relief, we’re done shading and can move onto the fancy stuff.

Thoughts on Shading & Washes

To offer a last thought on shading overall – keep it quick and gestural. When I started figuring this process out I was agonising over using a fine detail brush and spending hours carefully running the shade through each crevice. While control is still important, save yourself some grief and use a larger layer brush (depending on subject, fine is still best for faces), so long as you’re leaving yourself clean areas for the later steps to make a bigger impact, you really don’t need to get too fancy. As a benchmark, I usually want to be clear of shading in an hour on a model this size (30ish minutes for infantry)

And if you think you’ve overdone it, or need some more room to work, you can always do a spot-drybrush of Ivory again on the highlights to ‘clean’ the canvas and reapply.

Step 9: Varnish

Can you see the difference? Me either…

With the shade complete, I’m going to varnish everything. If you have the tools, I’d always recommend varnishing your work, not just for protection, but because different paints have different finishes, and these minor clashes in gloss, satin and matte can have a huge effect on the final result.

I use my airbrush to cover the whole miniature in a layer of gloss for protection (matte is terrible for this) then a layer of matte varnish to give me a nice, dull finish to gloss up later.

A last point - washes behave very differently when applied over varnish. I’d encourage you to experiment yourselves with this, there are a tonne of interesting things to uncover. As a quick suggestion, if you want to make a minor change to the overall hue (for example a sun tan) that doesn’t compromise your earlier work with the reds and purples, apply the shade after the varnish.

Step 10: Blood

This exact bit may be the most satisfying aspect of the hobby for me.

Alright, time for the glory steps – Blood and wetness. For this, I’m using Citadel’s fantastic Blood for the Blood God Technical Paint. I’m aware there’s other options out there, in particular I’ve heard Tamiya has a good one, so feel free to step off the path and find a brand that suits you.

Taking a small-ish clump of the blood paint, I’ll apply it roughly along a seam, crevice or ‘area of stress’ (more on that in a moment) on the miniature, I apply it relatively thickly along the seam because we’re going to work it in further in a moment.

Sidebar: By Areas of Stress, I mean parts of the character where you’d expect open wounds or sores to form, for example on the Caged (pic below) I really built up the blood around where the chains bite into his flesh. For me, this is a really fun part of the process as I can start contextualising small details of the miniature in it’s own reality. Tightly wrapped chains, and brutal armour over bare skin is going to be pretty uncomfortable, especially if your flesh is already a pulpy mass liable to slough at a moments notice...

Here’s a few of those ‘Areas of Stress’ I mentioned. Also note that green.

Once the initial paint is placed, clean your brush with some water, quickly now, you don’t want the paint to dry. Leaving the clean brush slightly damp, go over and lightly blend the blood up from the crevice, roughly doubling it’s surface area and creating a fade into the rest of the piece. As always, we’re leaving high points of the model untouched – it’s so tempting to go completely overboard with blood effects, but less really is more. What you’re trying to achieve here is a glistening effect, less of a blood splatter, and more of a natural, damp red warmth that you might expect to see on glistening flesh.

Apply this process over all the crevices and musculature on the model, approaching it in sections so you’re not letting the Blood Paint dry too much, preventing you from working it in with the damp brush. Another approach, if you’d like to work at a slower pace, is to use a wet palette for the blood paint, but personally I’ve found this takes me twice as long to achieve the same results.

Step 11: Rot

looks like bogies lol.

And the very last, super minor step is adding some Nurgle’s Rot to the Egg Sacs. I added this firstly because I felt the model needed to be a bit glossier, and I wanted the egg sacks to have a bit more distinction from the flesh cocoons.

As you might have guessed, this is step is a bit specific and depends on the model you’re working on, speaking more generally, you can consider this step ‘any other gloss effects’ – On other miniatures I’ll be looking at things like clear gloss varnish to bring some life to eyes, mouths or puddles on bases.

And with that, we’re all done!

Concluding Comments

Thanks for bearing with me diligent readers, I hope this gave you something interesting to chew on. I think some of the steps in here, even used in isolation as part of another painting style could still prove useful.

For this Mistress I blended in some purple for the tentacles and leaned a little more heavily on Drucii Violet across the model.

On the Grove Hierophant, I introduced some orange at the initial contrast basecoat.

On this Bloodfiend Brute, I swapped out the Guilliman Flesh for Grey.

Much lighter on the red/purple with this Man Eater, letting the Green and Brown do the heavy lifting.

I wanted to get this guy pretty close to ‘healthy’ skin to make the wounds look more horrific, as such, I added a warm brown wash (Reikland Fleshshade) during the shading steps.

As I mentioned at the start, I’ve figured this approach over a couple of years, thanks in no small part to the cavalcade of filthy flesh monstrosities dropped on my plate by the Bestiarum Design Crew.

Further resources

If you’d like to do some more research, here’s a few videos that really helped me figure things out and dial in the technique to something I was happy with.

Dana Howl – How to Underpaint Miniatures

Dana Howl’s youtube channel is a fantastic resource for the hobby and this video on underpainting was a huge help for me in figuring things out. In particular the early White Drybrush step was lifted directly from Dana’s awesome tutorial.

Sam Lenz (via Tabletop Minions – How to Paint in a ‘Sketch’ Style

Sam Lenz is a fantastic painter and I love the way he discusses technique at a more conceptual level. While his approach to sketch style uses a lot more layer paint than what I’ve described, this video is fantastic for building confidence and showing folks that you can achieve fantastic results without obsessive detail focus with a single-haired brush and magnifying glasses.

Cheers,

Marcus