A Guide to Painting Wood

Wood, metal, cloth, skin, facial hair and fancy shield designs are the main things you will need to paint in your Dark Age army.

Today I want to share with you my way of painting the wood items. All paints used here are from Vallejo. Let´s start.

1.- Start applying the base coat with Old Wood (310) or Beige Brown (70.875).

2.- Next, draw some thin lines to simulate the wood grain using watered down Hull Red (70.985)  and Orange Brown (70.981) .

3.- Now apply a wash to the whole surface with Sepia Shade (73.200) mixed with some thinner to increase the transparency.

With these the spears are finished, but we can continue working on the shields.

4.- Highlight one edge of the planks with Old Wood (310) and apply Umber Wash (73.203) only in the unions.

5.- To change the shade of the planks, we can apply thin washes of Umber Wash (73.203) on some of them. The more washes the more dark the plank will come.

6.- Finally, we can represent some damage by painting some fine lines with a mixture of brown and black, and adding another thin line under it with Old Wood (310) to increase the volume.

Here are some examples of miniatures painted by using this method.

 

 

Changing the colours and washes mentioned here you can obtain different shades. And if you want to represent some new treated wood you can finish your work with a satin varnish.

 

Author: Pedro Guerra Cernadas

	I'm from Galicia, Spain, and I'm a military history and modelling enthusiast. I started painting miniatures when I was 9 years old and since I couldn't stop.