Find Tips & Tricks on washes for miniatures here: The Army Painter

Create (Even) More Contrast with a Wash

Sure, the wash technique is talent-in-a-bottle for many painters but thanks to the heavy pigmentation and unique formulation of our Washes – the simple wash is just the beginning of what’s possible.

Mix with our Wash Medium for even more controlled applications, use it to tint metallic paint for a surreal shimmer, or wet blend washes on fleshy models for a really interesting take.

In this post, we’ll show you how to achieve even more contrast in your shading by no just applying more and more Dark Tone, but actually span the colour wheel.

5 Tips and Tricks for Achieving More Depth and Contrast with a Wash

Let’s look at the five tips and tricks for achieving even more depth and contrast with our Washes.

Tip 1: Using Washes for Skin Tones

For skin colours, our washes are excellent for creating subtle tonal differences, like sickly skin, tanned skin, or other, more alien tones.

For this guy, we used Purple Tone wash over Opal Skin to give the face a sicklier pale appearance.

Other fun tones could be red, blue, or even green to tone the skin to work as either a contrast to an armour on the model, or to create focus points on centrepieces in your army.

Tip 2: Control the Wash

Controlling the flow of wash is something you will get better at over time, and you will find that using different tones on specific areas and materials becomes easier with experience.

Being mindful of this when you apply your washes and by taking inspiration from this page, your results will improve very fast.

Tip 3: Orc Skin, Naturally

You can go absolutely nuts with fantasy humanoids, but this is one fun recipe for that classic orc look. Start with the Warpaints Air Greenskin Colour Triad. Then, apply a Soft Tone Wash followed by Red Tone Wash.

Finish with a drybrush of Greenskin, then Snake Scales for the brightest highlights.

Try making a rust wash for the metal parts that flows into the recesses with our Dark Rust or Fresh Rust and Wash Medium .

Tip 4: A Golden Statue

This miniature was given a coat of Greedy Gold with an airbrush, over a Matt Black primer. To get a dark battle-worn armour that suited the model really well, we first gave it a coat of Dark Tone Wash.

Next, to give the armour some more realistic golden tone we used Red Tone Wash as it would create some more contrast on the blue parts of the miniature.

Tip 5: Create Smooth Transitions

With our Wash Mixing Medium you can thin our Washes to ensure an even smoother transition, by glazing it on in a couple of applications. Or achieve a lighter shading effect that better fits lighter colours.

Only your creativity sets the limits of what can be achieved with our washes.

Advanced Techniques for Using Washes