How I Paint: Ice

I'll be honest, one of my favourite types of blog to write are the How To Paint series. It was also the thing I enjoyed most about working for Games Workshop - teaching people how to paint. If I could find a way to do that as part of StormFront Studios (My Commission Painting business) I would be one happy bunny.

Ice Golem, painted using this guide.

Today, I wanted to show you how I paint ice. You'll need the paints above, and a good drybrush. I use the Citadel Large Drybrush for every step shown below. There are also other ways to paint ice, this is just the super-quick way I do it.

This technique is seriously simple and fast. I started with a black undercoat (Citadel Chaos Black), but you could really skip Stage 1 by basecoating with Citadel's 'The Fang' spray. I just didn't have any to hand.

Stage 1 - The entire model (in this case; or at least the ice parts of whichever model you happen to be painting) is basecoated with The Fang.

Stage 2 - Mix Celestra Grey and The Fang in a 1:1 mix then drybrush the ice completely.

Stage 3 - The ice is then washed with Coelia Greenshade. "Wait, Coelia!?" I hear you cry, "Why not Drakenhof?". Well, I've done this technique with Drakenhof Nightshade before and, yes, it works, BUT I found that Coelia Greenshade makes the ice look colder.

Stage 4 - Mix up that Celestra Grey and The Fang 1:1 mix again (as I'm guessing it's dried in the time it's taken the wash to dry) and drybrush the entire model again. HOWEVER, this time drybrush ONLY in downward strokes - this is how you emulate the light refraction on the ice.

Stage 5 - Add some more Celestra Grey to the mix, and drybrush it again - again in a downward motion only.

Stage 6 - Now, again, but with pure Celestra Grey. The difficulty is that these pictures just don't capture the colour properly. Make sure your drybrush is really dry now, and hit just the raised areas.

Stage 7 - Finally, drybrush very, very lightly, just the very extreme raised areas with Ceramite White. Voila, you are done, and hopefully, you should have a model looking not dissimilar to the pictures below! These took all of 30 mins to paint, and most of that was waiting for the wash to dry.

As always, questions and comments are more than welcome!