----- Original Message -----
From: "Yosef Ibrahimi" <lothaire@hotmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2001 5:39 PM
Subject: [mini-painter] Blonde Hair

Looking over my horde of minis I realized that there is one thing I have never done. Paint a mini with blonde hair. I have figs with hair in almost every shade of Black and Brown and a bit with red hair but not a single Blonde. My few attempts have resulted in....Well thats best not gone into.

But help me minipainter Egroups your my only hope.

How interesting, most of my mini's are painted with blond hair, I used to do a lot of auburn hair, but I actually stayed away from doing black hair because of the difficulty of doing it nicely,

So, painting blond hair, "my way": (using GW paint names) Colors used, Bleached Bone, Snake Bite Leather, Skull White, Yellow Ink and Chestnut Ink.

1) I base coat with Bleached Bone.
2) I make a thin wash of Snake Bite Leather, I use the old OOP one, I don't know if it's exactly the same as the new stuff. I make this wash very thin, you can see your palette thru the wash, it's practically dirty water.
2)a. I mop this wash over the hair, usually doing this several times depending on the consistency (how dark) my wash is. One thing to keep an eye on is how the wash is settling into the recesses of the hair. You want the pigment to settle between the hair strands to provide shading, you don't want it to create the dread "ring around the tub" effect. You might add some "acrylic extender"etc or a smidgen of dish soap to break up the water tension so that your wash won't do this as much.
3) I dry brush the hair with Bleached bone
3)a. If there is too much contrast between the Wash of Snake Bite Leather and the Drybrushing of Bleached Bone, this can be corrected by making a thin wash of Bleached Bone (Just like step 2), except using Bleached bone) and applying this wash over all the hair to even out the color contrasts.
4) Repeat step 2)a. and step 3) as needed until the desired effect is achieved. I usually end up repeating these steps 3 - 5 times. Note: step 3) when repeated is usually done lighter each time to highlight.
5) Apply a very thin Wash of Yellow ink over all the hair.
6) Very lightly drybrush with Skull white on the highest highlights.
7) Apply a very thin Wash of Chestnut Ink in areas where you want additional shading that wasn't provided by the Wash of Snake Bite Leather. Repeat this step as needed and where needed. Be careful to not over do it. Take frequent breaks and come back to look at the effect you've gotten before deciding to do some more, it is very easy to do too much.

NOTE: the reason for so many steps and repeated steps is that if you onl;y did each step once, it would look very stark and contrasting, Hair isn't like that, especially blond hair. It ranged from a dirty brown at the roots to light blond at the damaged tips for long hair. It may be platinum blond which will be mostly white with a hint of bleached bone as shading. etc. in any case the highlights very often show very subtly different colors for the highlights or shading.

For example of how my Blond hair looks using this technique, please view my galleries on my site at
CAUTION - WET PAINT
http://www.angelfire.com/games2/cautionwetpaint/

Hope this helps

Kenneth in Hawaii
"Sure, when... - OINK FLAP OINK FLAP - Well I'll be darned!"