WARGAME COLOR SET. BONES AND SKELETONS

Bone shades for an undead retinue

Bone is not white. It is in fact a warm, yellowish material that sinks into gray and brown in the recesses and, on the exposed edges, goes pale instead. That is exactly the range this quartet covers: a somber brown, a gray-brown, a warm gray and an ivory.

The proven sequence of steps looks like this. The darkest brown goes on overall as a base, the second tone is thinned into the grooves between the ribs and the vertebrae, the warm gray goes on with a dry brush over the edges and the ivory only on the highest points: the cheekbones, the joints, the fingertips. The contrast between groove and edge is what makes a skeleton readable even at the distance of a gaming table.

The box is not tied to the undead alone. The same tones describe elephant tusks, sun-bleached wood, canvas sacks or the parchment of maps and scrolls. The ivory also works as a base under the teeth and claws of larger beasts.

Details of the package: four bottles, each of 17 ml, a water-based acrylic binder, a matte finish. It is applied by brush and by airbrush, and it pays to seal a finished figure with a varnish, because matte acrylics on their own do not stand up to abrasion.

An undead army needs consistency. When every piece goes through the same sequence of steps and the same thinning ratio, the force reads as a whole on the table even when the individual figures will not stand close inspection. It therefore pays to paint in batches of ten to twelve pieces at once and to finish each step on all of them before moving to the next. The time saved on mixing and cleaning the brush is surprisingly noticeable on a larger force.