Slitherine

I am setting up to paint 9 elephants. I have been painting for a long time, but this my first attempted with Nellies. Any suggestions or threats (urls) that I can reference would be appreciated.

Larry

Not sure about URLS's, but if you look closely Elelphants are a brownish colour and not grey, not sure why people paint them that colour

Fenton wrote:Not sure about URLS's, but if you look closely Elelphants are a brownish colour and not grey, not sure why people paint them that colour

Much easier to have a standard grey than the correct brownish color for Indian elephant.
As the African elephants are much grey and are the ones we are used to see on TV... we paint elephants grey.

My way is to paint them with light grey, then black wash and finally white dry-brush.
On my Xyston elephants it makes a nice result as a miniature even if it's not the correct colour for Indian elephants.

I used a cheap flat grey spray paint from Dollar General to paint the base color. Then I painted the details and finished it off with a dip of Minwax Polyshades Tudor stain to darken it and get into the folds.

Christopher "The Tasty Numidian" Anders

I paint them light gray, wash with brown (Citadel 'flesh wash' is good, not too red) and drybrush with a light brownish grey (I mix some brown into a very light grey base) which brings out the highlights and moderates the muddy quality of the wash.

Elephant skin is grey however they cover themselves with mud, water, dust etc as a sun/parasite screen and will therefore take on the general colour of the surrounding terrain. I have even seen red elephants in the Namib!

I paint the elephant a (very) dark brown base colour and then add whatever the terrain colour is to lighten it. Once I have blocked in the basic areas I begin drybrushing progressively lighter terrain colour always working up from the feet and making the lightest final coat just around the feet, knees and belly.

Working elephants also rub the skin away to reveal a pink flesh colour beneath. This occurs on the forhead and thicker part of the trunk, knees etc. On 25mm this can be effective.

Unfortunately wargames animals are very poorly painted IMHO but a little research pays dividends. I practiced with 3 different methods before setting on this one.

I hope this is of use.

Yours

Pelagius

Primer black
Drybrush a dark brown (at each stage just make sure a small amount of this is visiible)
Drybrush a dark grey
Highlight up 2-3 times with lighter shades of gray
Do details
Liver kick your adversary with them

I undercoat black , dry brush grey, wash with black in ink here and there to bring out the wrinkliness. Wash in layers of brown.

Here are a couple of galleries with elephant examples which might help:

http://www.users.qwest.net/~hughesalan/ ... /index.htm
http://expendablecic.tripod.com/seleucid/index.htm

Vedic indian
http://www.freewebtown.com/wwebz/pics.html

Later Muslim Indian
http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/peter. ... /index.htm