Warpaints Fanatic Matching Colour Schemes
With Warpaints Fanatic just around the corner, many hobbyists out there are eager to make the jump into the new range. New projects and armies beckon with their bare grey awaiting the touch of a Hobby: Basecoating Brush to transform them into the pinnacle of tabletop gaming, the envy of all those models awaiting their turn - a fully painted mini.
Not all projects start from scratch however. As many hobbyists can attest, army projects can span years of time. Adding in the hottest new unit to boost your tabletop chances, or merely taking your time and painting at a pace that you're comfortable with, we all know it can take time. The prospect of adding a new paint range to your arsenal under those circumstances can be daunting. Your already have an established colour scheme and want to make sure any new additions to your force match and don't look out of place. Even if the new paints have exceptional coverage and performance with 300 - 700% more pigment, it can be intimidating to take the plunge. How do you know you'll be able to match your colour scheme?
Our resident social media specialist and American paint correspondent, Tyler Mengel, takes a look at how he translated one of his existing colour schemes over to Warpaints Fanatic while maintaining a cohesive look to the collection.
Tyler: As a lifelong hobbyist I have several collections that I keep going throughout the years. Some of these span almost a decade or more, whilst others are newer, such as my Ogor Mawtribes by Games Workshop for Warhammer: Age of Sigmar. It's a rare thing to have a project done in one shot however, and these lovable behemoths are no exception. Other projects pop up and the hobby butterfly takes over, but now I’ve returned to the army this time with Warpaints Fanatic and Speedpaint on my desk. This of course means transitioning colours and finding the appropriate match. With some colours this is fairly straight forward, while others take a bit more experimenting to get right. Don't let this deter you though, as with just a bit of work it's easier than you think to make the switch and get stuck in with Warpaints Fanatic on your older collections.
The Skin
When it came to my Ogor Mawtribes there were several prominent colours I had to match when making the transition to Warpaints Fanatic. The clothing, metal, and various bits of leather, but none were as important as the skin.
It's such a large and noticeable area on these models and as close as these bipedal garbage disposals get to an "army colour" that if I was able to get it to match, than the rest of the colours would fall into place.
The skin tone I had picked for my Ogors was a rather unique and sickly colour, so had no direct companion within the Warpaints Fanatic range. Instead I picked the closest colour, which was Great Hall Grey, and then worked from there. Through some testing, I needed to mix in Necrotic Flesh to get that green tinge. I then used a custom shade blend of Light Tone and Military Shade Wash. This was further strengthened in some recesses with Strong Tone on its own. I finished it all off with Brainmatter Beige mixed into the mid-tone for the highlights.
Though I had to do a bit of mixing to get there, I think the finished skin tone is an almost 100% match to the original colour scheme. I even think it looks a bit better! While it can seem daunting at first, even colours that don't have a 1 to 1 translation to something within the Warpaints Fanatic range can be easily achieved with a bit of mixing. With 216 paints to pick from, you're sure to find the mix that works best for you. For larger army projects such as this, once you've nailed down your mix I would recommend mixing up a bottle of it in one of our Paint Mixing Empty Bottles, so you can easily have it on hand when you move onto your next unit.
You can check out a side by side comparison of one of the original models and the new one on the right using Warpaints Fanatic below.
Original
Updated
I used one mini as a test model before painting the rest of the unit of course. You can even tell as his skin is slightly lighter and pinker than the rest as I hadn't 100% solidified my mix yet. This is an important step to take when trying to match your older colour scheme with the new paint range, especially if there is a lot of mixing such as I had here. Even that one test model had parts of him repainted twice as I tweaked and adjusted what colours I was using to match the Ogor skin.
The Other Colours
Not all of the colours were as involved as the skin however. With things like wood and leather I just picked an appropriate brown from the Warpaints Fanatic range, in this case Brigadine Brown and Oak Brown respectively. Since these are smaller areas of colour, it's easier to get away with deviations from the rest of the army. Even from a lore perspective, it's easy enough to imagine the Ogors using different sources of wood and leather and not being as uniform with it.
The black started with a basecoat of Matt Black, and then had some Grey Castle mixed in to get the warmer highlights I had on the rest of the models, while the wrappings were done with Speedpaint Pallid Bone.
Even the cloth of the pants, which had some mixing and glazing done to more closely match, can have some deviation as it's just cloth, and also not the "main" colour of the army.
One, Big, Happy Family
With the new unit done you can see how seamlessly they fit in alongside the rest of the army. This will only grown even more seamless as I add additional new units to the army. One thing you can do is to mix new models in within old units. If you've been able to match the colour scheme closely enough, this will further blend the two together. In my case I have another half of the Ironguts unit to paint, and plan on doing another unit of regular Ogors, which I will mix with the old unit. This way it'll be even harder for the eye to discern any differences.
Don't let the prospect of switching paint ranges deter you when in the middle of a project. Often, you'll be able to find fairly close matches for most of your colours, and with a little mixing you'll be able to fill in the rest. While going through this process with my Ogors I even discovered some better ways to paint colours I had previously done on the first half of the army, such as using the new Fresh Rust effects paint in combination with regular acrylics for the rust.
With 216 paints to pick from in the Warpaints Fanatic range, you're sure to find a colour, or mix of colours to match your existing collections and keep them growing for years to come!