PAINTING RED

A SAMUEL BENSON MINIATURES TUTORIAL

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146 Hull Red

Red isn’t known for its perfect coverage, so it’s important you start with a
colour that covers well, and nudges things in the right direction. Here I’ve
laid down a few thin coats of Hull Red which is almost more of a brown. It
provides a really good base and covers consistently.

034 Burnt Cad Red

Burnt Cad red is now applied over most of the surface, blending away from
the darkest areas that remain purely Hull Red.

031 Flat Red

034 Burnt Cad Red

A mix of Flat Red and Burnt Cad Red is now applied over roughly 50% of the
surface, this will establish the overall colour of the model, so mix in more or
less Flat Red depending on how bright you wish the model to appear overall.
Mix a little excess as we’ll come back to the mix a few times.

031 Flat Red

Pure Flat red provides a sharper highlight, this colour will tend to shift the
model toward orange if you use too much, so it is applied fairly sparingly to
brighted the red, rather than trying to achieve an overall coat.

031 Flat Red

034 Burnt Cad Red
005 Ivory

Adding Ivory to the previous mix provides the “pink” highlight used in this
method for red. Left here the armour would look pretty horrible, so do not
despair if your red is not looking very nice after this step, it is the addition
of a futher highlights and shading that makes this red illusion work.

005 Ivory

Pure Ivory provides our brightest highlight and allows us to add glints and scratches.
Highlight edges at this stage and blend Ivory where the light will naturally sheen
across the surface. This stage adds a lot of impact to our red, but once again do not
expect the model to look a good red at this stage, we need to recover some of the red
tones and add harsh shading to achieve the desired look.

031 Flat Red

034 Burnt Cad Red

Our red mix is again applied to soften some of the highlights applied earlier. At this
stage we are applying thin layers as a glaze (thin paint and do not load the brush
very heavily) rather than painting opaque layers. This will recover the red
appearance while only minimally darkening the overall colour. We are also able to
tighten any of the highlights we applied a little messily.

089 Military Green

034 Burnt Cad Red

Much of the impact from this method of painting red is not achieved until this last
stage. Mixing green into red works very well to darken red without the “muddy” look
that adding black can achieve. Green and red are opposite each other in the colour
wheel, and many colours that sit opposite can be mixed in this way to darken each
other. Using thinned paint I feather shading into the darkest areas, ensuring I have
strong contrast with edge highlights to achieve that shiny look.