On the Tangent of Goblinoids

Chaos fills my painting area. Both literally and metaphorically. You see, I am an untidy artist who leaves paints, brushes, new lead, off cuts, half finished miniatures and more littering my table. My wife contributes further, dumping anything she considers 'not her's' on the heap. Around this chaotic clutter I work.

On chaos models.

Occasionally I paint something different. Like the Tzeentch daemons I painted a few months back or an undead character. Yesterday, I found myself wanting to paint something different alongside the chaos thug unit I am working on. Now I have a varied and copious lead pile.

So what to choose?

Inspired by a thread on the Oldhammer Forum, I choose a simple goblin. It had been awhile since I had painted a greenskin so the prospect was an attractive one. I was also interested in working on painting different shades of brown leather, and Goblinoids are usually bedecked in browns, so I selected a model, cleaned, based and primed it.

But what of the colour scheme? I knew that I wanted to try out some new basing ideas, especially after the fascinating discussion we had a few posts back and that brown would be a key colour of the clothing. How was I going to paint the goblin's skin?

Obviously, I was going to go for colours sympathetic to my Old School approach to painting. So I flicked through a couple of 80s White Dwarfs for inspiration for greens. I soon realised that there were as many interpretations of how to paint a goblin as there are shades of green, though yellow seems to have been a popular choice in the mix back in the day.

I had a look over my previous efforts of greenskin glories and realised that I had used a range of different colour schemes over the years. Here are some of them.

In the end I went for Goblin Green as a base. Over this I washed old Citadel Green Ink from the Expert Paint Set. Once this had dried, I picked out the details of the skin using the base colour once again. Into this base I mixed Sunburst Yellow and a little yellow ink, building up the highlights until I added a little white for the final highlight. This gave the skin a greeny yellow hue which satisfied me. For the eyes I used Blood Red and the lip Liche Purple. Over both I washed diluted Purple Ink to give the face some sinister depth. The eyes were tidied up with Blood Red once more before I painted a dot of orange as a pupil. The lip received a highlight of white and purple... And it was done. All I had to do was paint the clothing and weapon and I was done!

Now, I got a huge amount of inspiration from the bases discussion and hope to start another one about painting orcs and goblins, so I am going to ask you to contribute your recipes for painting green skins below. Additionally, if you are one of those LURKERS who keep themselves to the shadows and you have some nicely painted old school Goblinoids that no-one gets to see then email me at realmofchaos80s@yahoo.co.uk or provide us with a link below.

So then... Orcs and gobbos... how do you paint them?

Orlygg.