Painting Drow Skin

Painting Drow skin can be tricky. Many books describe the drow as having jet black skin, but that does not look good on minis. A mini with completely black skin will look flat and boring. There are several options for painting drow skin. I'm going to provide my recipies and tell a little about what each recipe is good for.

Dark Brown

The dark brown version of drow skin is my favorite if there is not too much skin showing. It provides greater depth that the other recipies and it is easy to make facial details stand out. If there is a lot of skin showing, I usually avoid this version, since a lot of brown skin can make the drow look human and friendly.

I use GW colours only for this recipe:

1. Basecoat in Bestial Brown
2. Carefully shade with Scorched Brown
3. Rehilight with Bestial
4. Highlight with Snakebite Leather
5. Highlight with Desert Yellow

Be careful not to highlight too much, as this will give a yellow look.

Even Darker Brown

A darker version of the Brown Skintone

I use GW colours only for this recipe:

1. Basecoat in Scorched Brown
2. Highlight (not too much) with Bestial Brown
2. Final Highlight Snakebite Leather

Dark Grey

The dark grey version of drow skin is well suited for large areas of skin. I find it a little more difficult to do that the brown and it can be hard to get facial details to stand out, especially if the eyes are small.

For the Dark Grey drow skin I use a combination of GW and Foundry colours:

1. Basecoat in black
2. Highlight with Foundry Charcoal Black (or GW Codex grey mixed with Black) in several layeres.
3. Shade with black

I try to be careful and not highlight too much, since I don't want the drow to look like a elf painted with NMM skin.
I do plan on making a version that is a little more highlighted, just to see if I can pull it off.

Dark Blue

I really don't know what to think about this one. Part of me thinks it's rather wierd and hard to work with, but on the other hand, it's probably the skintone that comes closest to "jet black".

I use only GW colours:

1. Basecoat in black
2. Highlight with several thinned layers of Storm Blue or Midnight Blue
3. Shade with black

There are the skintones I've tried so far. In the future, I plan to try a black/purple version and maybe also a lighter blue one.