How to Use Speedpaint for Vibrant Ork Skin on Miniatures
By The Army Painter | Published: 2026-09-15
Category: 操作指南
A step-by-step Speedpaint technique for painting vibrant ork skin: prime bright, lay one-coat green, add depth with brown, and finish with crisp highlights.
Quick answer
Paint vibrant ork skin by priming bright, applying Speedpaint: Absolution Green in one even coat, shading recesses with Speedpaint: Satchel Brown, then adding crisp highlights with a lighter green. Speedpaint's one-coat formula does the shading and highlighting work for you, so you get tabletop-ready ork skin in minutes rather than layered hours.
Ork skin is the fastest way to make a mob read as a mob. Get the green right and the rest of the model almost paints itself. The trick is not more layers, it is fewer, better-placed ones. Speedpaint is built for exactly this: a one-coat painting solution with consistent flow across all colours, perfect contrast, and an intense shading and highlighting effect that settles into the recesses on its own.
This guide walks through a repeatable Speedpaint technique for vibrant ork skin, from priming to the final highlight. You will use a small set of paints and let the medium do the work. If you are painting a whole Waaagh, the same steps scale to batch painting without changing the order.
What you need before you start
You do not need a full paint rack for this. A bright primer, one saturated green, one brown for depth, one lighter green for pop, and a fine brush will cover a whole unit. Speedpaint comes in 18ml spill-free dropper bottles with mixing balls pre-loaded in each bottle, so a quick shake is enough to get an even mix without fighting a clogged nozzle.
The paint choice matters more than the brush choice here. Speedpaint: Absolution Green is a deep green one-coat solution, and Speedpaint: Satchel Brown is a dark reddish brown. Together they give you the classic ork combination: green skin with warm, reddish shadow that keeps the skin from looking flat or cold.
- Prime bright. A light or white primer gives Speedpaint the most vibrancy; a dark primer mutes the green.
- Keep a clean water pot and a dry brush handy for wicking away pooling before it dries.
- Work in batches of five to ten models so the paint stays wet long enough to move around.
Step-by-step: vibrant ork skin with Speedpaint
The order below is the whole method. Prime, base, shade, highlight, and stop. Each step has one checkpoint that tells you whether to move on or fix something first. Do not skip the checkpoint, because Speedpaint is hard to correct once it has fully dried.
If you are painting ork skin across a squad, complete one step on every model before starting the next. This keeps your colour consistent and lets each coat dry while you work on the next model, which is the real time-saver behind Speedpaint.
- Thin nothing. Speedpaint is designed to go on straight from the bottle.
- Load the brush properly, then touch the model once and let the paint flow rather than brushing it out.
The Speedpaint ork skin sequence
- Prime bright and let it cure fully: Spray or brush a light primer over the whole model and let it dry completely before any Speedpaint touches it. A bright undercoat is what makes Absolution Green read as vibrant rather than muddy. Checkpoint: if the primer still smells or feels tacky, wait. Speedpaint over wet primer will lift and pool unevenly.
- Apply Absolution Green in one even coat: Load the brush, touch it to the skin, and let the paint flow into the recesses instead of scrubbing it around. Work one limb at a time and wick away any pool that forms on flat areas like the chest or forehead. Checkpoint: if the surface looks patchy while wet, leave it. Speedpaint settles as it dries and often looks more even than it did going on.
- Push Satchel Brown into the deepest recesses: While the green is fully dry, run a thin line of Satchel Brown into the eye sockets, under the jaw, between fingers, and along muscle creases. Keep it to the deepest points only. Mistake to avoid: coating the whole model in brown. That kills the green. A little in the right places does the job.
- Add a controlled highlight on raised areas: Pick a lighter green or a small amount of the orange triad for accents, and apply it only to the highest points: brow, nose, knuckles, and shoulder tops. Keep the brush nearly dry and use short strokes. Checkpoint: if the highlight looks chalky, you used too much. Wipe the brush and feather the edge instead of adding more paint.
- Seal and finish the rest of the model: Once the skin is dry, varnish it and move on to the gear, leather, and teef. The skin should be the brightest, most saturated part of the miniature so the eye goes there first. Mistake to avoid: repainting the skin after varnishing. If you need a fix, reapply a thin green layer and let it dry before sealing again.
Paints that do the heavy lifting
- Speedpaint: Absolution Green: Deep Green one-coat painting solution with consistent flow, perfect contrast, and an intense shading and highlighting effect, supplied in 18ml spill-free dropper bottles with mixing balls pre-loaded. One even coat gives you the base green and much of the shading at once, so ork skin reads clearly without layering.
- Speedpaint: Satchel Brown: Dark Reddish Brown one-coat painting solution with the same consistent flow and contrast behaviour as the rest of the range. A warm reddish brown in the deepest recesses keeps ork skin from looking flat and ties the green to leather, straps, and teef.
- Flexible Triad: Oranges: Six 18ml Warpaints Fanatic acrylic paints ranging from deep and dark to bright and light, built to make colour choice easy for magical effects, vibrant flowers, and fantastical creatures. Useful for ork eyes, warpaint, and small accent details that make a green mob look alive rather than uniform.
Vibrant ork skin comes down to four decisions: bright primer, one even green coat, warm brown in the deep recesses, and a restrained highlight. Speedpaint handles the shading and highlighting effect for you, so the whole process stays fast enough to finish a mob in an evening. Start with one test ork, lock in your green, then batch the rest of the Waaagh.
