Drybrushed and Highlighted Plaguebearer

This is a plaguebearer that I feel I've spent a whole lot of time on over the past couple of weeks, on and off.

Once more, I decided to stray from the usual sickly green colour scheme and go for something altogether darker and broodier. This is the result, and I'm broadly very pleased with it.

The painting was done in a few main stages. After the undercoat (in black) and undercoat (brown with black ink), I progressively drybrushed this plaguebearer lighter and lighter. But when I say lighter and lighter, the first few coats were only a little above black in terms of their hue. Along the way, I "contaminated" my paint brush (with intent!) with some yellows, browns and greens ad lib. This is a technique that I think I'll adopt for some plague marines as well - it seems to have worked out very well.

Once content with the drybrushing, I turned to the open sores and wounds. I basecoated these in pink and subsequently washed (inked) them red. Using a combination of reds, pinks and oranges, I steadily lightened the colour back up again to give a glistening, yet necrotic, feel to the wounds.

In other details, I highlighted around the wounds with a light grey colour to help them stand out and make the surrounding skin appear more like it is flaking away (yuck!) and highlighted the arm that turns in to a tentacle. The plaguesword follows my strange blue colour scheme (indeed, the unnatural blue plagueswords are a unifying aspect of my plaguebearers). The wrist bangle was painted in gold, inked darker and highlighted to give a worn look. The horn was highlighted in off-white and the eyeball dotted with a steady hand.

All in all, a solid addition to the growing plaguebearer band!