Tutorial: How to Paint Orc Skin

Green is a fun shade to paint. Perhaps its because the human eye has an easier time distinguishing between shades of green, or maybe it's because green skin usually means monsters -- and monsters are fun. They say it's not easy being green, but I'm betting that it's certainly wildly entertaining.

After cleaning and assembly, the figure was primed with white primer. A zenithal prime will work just as well.

The figure for this tutorial is the "Pig-Faced Ork with Sword #1a" from Otherworld Miniatures.

The first step is simply a base coat of thinned down mid green like Pro Acryl Dark yellow Green.

For variant shades, we'd start off with a different colour depending on whether we want our skin to be darker or lighter. For now, we'll just assume this is your 'standard' green ork, useful for games of Warhammer or Dungeons & Dragons and return to alternate skintones in a later step.

Shading is done with thinned down dark green like Pro Acryl Black Green or GW Contrast Dark Angels Green applied into the crevices of the miniature as well as anywhere that should appear shadowed including eyes and teeth.

Here I've added further shading with a little black added to our previous green, thinned down with water or contrast medium and applied to the deepest recesses.

I used a glossy medium, which makes it easy to spot where this shading was placed.

By this step, we're almost ready to start highlighting. I've gone back to the foundation colour to strengthen our base skintone. This is most noticeable on the ears and cheeks, but is also applied anywhere else there shouldn't be shadow.

Now it's time for highlights. These were done with Pro Acryl Yellow Green applied only to the upper most areas.

For stronger highlights, you can mix in some ivory to the green for the top most spots on the cheeks, nose, and tips of the ears.

For the brightest highlights, I'm using very llittle green and relying on a very thin coat of ivory. These are applied to the eyebrows as well as beneath the eyes to make them stand out, and streaking along the nose to create the illusion of wrinkles.

We could stop right here, finish up the teeth, eyes, and rest of the figure, to get a perfectly servicable orc. But why stop here when we can take it further and make him more visually engaging?

Back in the old Dungeons & Dragons days, orcs were defined as having pink on the tips of their noses and snouts. At first, you might think that such radically different colours clash, but we can make this work in a very interesting way.

Using thinned paint, we'll start touching just small areas of the ork's skin with a dark skin tone. Areas to focus on should be the ears, lips, and snout, but be careful to leave as much green showing as possible. After all, this is an orc, not some white guy from the suburbs!

The next step is to highlight our new pink flesh parts. Since we're doing this on top of the green skin, we don't need to mess with shading -- the green skin already does that for us.

Mix in a little ivory or other pale skin colour and add highlights.

It's also a good idea to take our pink skin tone and glaze it across the transistion to blend the pink and green together.

Further highlights of the pink parts were done with the fleshtone, just the same as you would highlight anything else.

For final highlights, I picked out the uppermost areas with a thin glaze of pure ivory. I also added some 'lip lines' while highlighting, though this is actually more effective on orks with fatter lips.

Here, we'll review how the skin, eyes, and teeth come together and make any necessary corrections. One important thing to look for here is making sure the teeth and eyes stand out well. A few additional highlights on the skin can do this for us, but alternately we can also darken the areas around the eyes and mouth even more.

Here we can see how the skin and clothing tie together in the final paint scheme. It's also the point where we'd make any last minute tweaks. In this case, I think he's ready to be clearcoated!