10. Painting skeletons and rusty iron

This will be my first post mainly about painting, I want to share a really easy and quick method of making good (enough) looking skeleton warriors (with rusty weapons). Painting skeletons, as they are usually not very complicated models, you can save a plenty of time with proper technic. And what is this proper technic? Lets go step by step, and I try to enlighten, were the time saving is:

1. Priming: well, its important and pretty quick with a spray can, there is not much to save. But, with choosing the proper color, you can skip the main basecoat color: I use Skeleton Bone, from Army Painter, which is a light brown-ochre (I’m color-blind, so don’t judge me if I’m wrong). So with that, the skeletons got the priming and the main basecoat in one quick step.
2. Drybrushing the bones: drybrushing is a very quick method of getting highlights, but it has some disadvantages:
• It works on big surfaces well, but not so well on small ones, where you need to be more precise, because other parts can be also affected.
• It leaves a bit textured-dusty-dirty effect.
• So the secret of drybrushing is to use it on proper parts at the proper phase (and to use soft, cheap makeup brush). Skeletons are therefor typical: they are mainly made of bones, and its not a problem, if they don’t look like very clean. And if the bone-parts are made completely ready at first, its no problem to hit other parts with the drybrushing, because they will be painted afterwards (don’t mind to hit anything)! So I use a heavy drybrush of off-white on the hole body, and then a zenital drybrushing (brush stokes only from top-to-bottom, so, it affects only the top parts, as would normal lighting) with cold white (colors may vary). And there is a ready highlighted skeleton!
3. Basecoating the not-bone parts (hopefully only some smaller areas, the time saving of this method is depending on the bone / not bone proportion)
4. Using a wash on every part (brown on the bone parts, optional on the other parts)
5. Arbitrary highlighting method on the other parts, as you wish
6. Varnishing (if you wish, but I would recommend this)
7. I’m not a speed-painter, but I could make easily 10 skeletons ready in some hours…

The other method I use, and would like to show here, is painting of rusty iron. There are a plenty of tutorials out there for this, but I like this at best: I use a rusty basecoat color on the metal parts (I mix orange with dark brown one to one), and then simply drybrush it with iron metallic color, and… that’s it. I really like the results, textured effect of drybrushing comes very handy here to represent an uneven surface, and its very-very fast. You can judge for yourself!

One last hint: at the shields I painted the whole surface with the rusty-iron method, and then painted some original colors on them, taking care of not hitting the edges with that color.

Here is my result with this really fast method (the miniatures are from Mantic):