I am about to paint some of the CD minis I’ve converted from those drab GW normal dwarves, but I’d like to move in a different direction than the standard red hues. However, the painting tests I’ve done don’t seem to capture the evilness and spirit of the CDs.
The first scheme I tried was to incorporate fiery lava coloured beards. I had seen a model or two with them and thought that they would be enough to keep the “fire and forge” theme. The rest of the colour scheme kinda fell to bright silver/gold for the armour and blues for leather and the result was that my converted CD looked more like a regular Dwarf. :sick
The second scheme and currently my favourite is a bit more sinister, mixing dark greens and purples. I think the colours are striking, but yet again, its losing the CD feel. :idea
Here are the test models:
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After these, I’m feeling rather frustrated with painting tests and thinking of going radically weird with the scheme, such as painting the scale armour itself greens or purples, but I thought I would seek the advice of the esteemed Dawi Zharr on this forum before doing so.
Not esteemed? With over a thousand posts and a title, I would argue that you are.
re: reds and blacks
I’m not against their use, its just that I’ve painted my share of very red models - I used to play Khorne Chaos armies in 40k and have developed an aversion to red. I’m trying to seek out alternatives before falling back for the CDs. It would be nice to have a different look, but I have to admit that its harder than it looks. Colour theory was never a strong point for me as an artist
With the fiery beards they look too much like Dwarf Slayers so i would stay away from that. I personally am going through the biggest red phase ever and since i am pleased with my colour scheme im going to stick with it. If i was going to do something different i would use either greens or purples. Not a mixture of both. Personally i would use purple. Heres a purple blunderbuss i tried:
I tried a few different colour schemes when i was told it had a bit too much brown but i never got round to posting pics. I did one that was half purple, half red as well which i should really finish and i started a green one which i will try finish. It was going to be mainly dark angels geen with snot green highlights then maybe scorpion green around some of the edges. I like to add dark grey into everything for some reason as well so expect that in a lot of my painting.
Pyro Stick, you may be onto something with that. I’ll give painting the scale armour a go and see if that helps with retaining the CD look.
I like the scales on your model. I’ve had a hell of time trying to get decent definition on the scales. My scale armour is very inconsistent. After 10 models of rank and file troops, its gotten better but it still needs a bang on paintjob to bring out the shadows between plates.
For the scale mail on that blunderbuss i painted it all Liche Purple, inked it lightly black, painted each individual scale in Liche Purple again highlighted with Warlock Purple. If you read my army blog thread you should find out how i paint my red armour as well.
Light blue is too close to the GW standard dwarf paintjob. I’ve seen pretty much every other scheme and they seem to work pretty good. I think I’d go for dark green if I had to start again.
You won’t have to stick to red and green really, but consider darker colours whatever you take. A brightly-painted vampire counts army does not look dark and evil. The same goes for Chaos Dwarfs. Also try using brass or bronze colours instead of shiny gold. That would be my 2 cents.
I think black scale mail would look good if you did the decorations green, or preferably purple. Just give it a light drybrush of mithril silver after undercoating, then tidy up with a blob of black on each scale. I tried this with blood red highlights once instead of silver, tricky on small scales but fairly easy on big ones.
Green scale mail would be a bit too unusual IMO. If you have to use it I would go for an ‘evil green’ effect;
Catachan Green
watered down Chestnut wash
Catachan green highlights
Camo Green highlights
Rotting flesh on extreme edges.
I’ve also seen dirty yellow used quite effectively on a CD army, bone white (see here), and purple (see here)
I think your dwarfs look pretty good, if a little tzeentch-ish.
I personally plan on using a greenish scheme for my dwarves, to get away from the red/black standard. I am currently using the standard brass/metal for the scale mail, but that could easily change.
the only colors I would stick with would be black for the hair/beard.
Black and grey are pretty much the hair colors that define them as being different from the cousins. I know in a book I recently read the chaos dwarf in it had black and oily hair. (Palace of the Plague Lord)
ive painted some of my dwarfs a sort of dark turquoise with very bright silver metal which has come out alright but im not sure how a whole army would look:idea
Do you feel that its chaos-y or evil-looking enough? The main reason I went back to the reds and bronze colours was to retain the feel of the Chaos Dwarves.
