Here's an "old school" Lizardmen banner, which is connected to a very key development in my painting. It was on this unit of Saurus that I first developed the Shaded Basecoat technique!
The basic idea of that technique is to lay down a series of simplified, lighter colors which establish where the basic lights and darks will be. These lighter tones can be tinted and shaded darker with a series of glazes, followed by more refinement in the "middle tone" areas.
This has several advantages. First, I can paint entire armies with just 5 or 6 colors, as I have simplified the palette. I can more easily match a set of colors years later, with no knowledge of which specific colors that were originally used.
Since most of the color matching happens with glazes as opposed to mixing and matching the colors on the palette, it is very flexible indeed!
This is at the very core of my techniques, and it is why I created the Painting Pyramid video series, in order to show this to a greater audience. I teach this class all the time at conventions such as Repaercon and Nova Open.
Here's a link to that original article from years ago:
