How to paint wood

[Vulcan7200]

Hi there everyone!

I just started getting into Malifaux, and decided to start with Collodi. However, the one issue I'm going to run into is painting. I'm color blind, which hasn't stopped me from painting before, but does add some challenges. In this case, I have no idea what colors to use and what techniques to use to effectively make something look like wood.

 

Any tips or tricks to achieve this?

[Bengt]

Unpainted wood can be almost any shade of brown. E.g. Mahogny is dark brown with a red tint and Birch is pale yellow. Weathered wood can be grey. The grain in most wood would not be visible at this scale but if you want the wood to look rough or perhaps go for a little exaggeration, paint thin lines along the object in a darker shade.

Thing is that most people will unconsciously map any hard brown object to wood so I wouldn't worry too much about this.

[YourGitFacedCousin]

I like to mix a light grey and brown, leaning closer to the grey, then I throw a brown wash over the painted wood. It gives a believable weathered wood look.

[LunarSol]

There's an excellent tutorial on Bell of Lost Souls in an article about painting the Gobber Tinker from Warmachine.

That said, it boils down to:

- Paint it a very dark brown.  Battlefield Brown in P3 or Rhinox Hide in Citadel dark.

- Heavily dry brush it in a lighter brown.  This will generally be the primary tone of it, slightly darker than the color you pick.  I like the P3 Bloodtracker Brown personally.

- Lightly drybrush over top of that with something primarily grey, but some early qualities don't hurt.  Trollblood Highlight or Bastion Grey.  The more heavy you apply this, the older and more weathered it will look.

- Wash with Agrax Earthtone.

That's what I do and I've been quite happy with the results.  It's not a great picture, but you can see some of the PlastCraft crates in this picture painted with these directions.  I'm pretty happy with them personally:

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