Thread: Painting Skulls (in 5 minutes or less!)

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I have no doubt that someone else has already posted this kind of how-to, but I figure it doesn't hurt to have another take on it. This is how I'm painting my plastic/foam skulls this year. It results in a somewhat weathered/aged look which I like and it's actually quite quick to do.

I use acrylic paints-- $0.66 for a 2oz bottle at the local "Craft Warehouse". I also bought the Harbor Freight "Deluxe Airbrush Kit ITEM # 95810" for $15. You probably don't need the airbrush, but hey, I always wanted an airbrush and this one cost less than a dinner out.

To start off, I painted the skull with a coat of flat white latex paint (just your basic house paint). I mixed in some satin finish tan and a little black. Proportions are not critical-- just something vaguely ivory looking. I used a sprayer to avoid brush marks. You don't want to make it too thick, just enough to cover the plastic or foam or whatever you're working with.

I mixed up a very weak (probably 50:1) wash of water and brown paint. Then a slightly stronger wash (more like 5:1) of a tan/yellow. A third wash (again in the 5:1 range) was made for a dark brown-- that's used in the airbrush.



I painted the teeth on my skull white with the airbrush. Mostly just because I like playing with the airbrush, so you could easily skip that part. Here's the starting point:



Using the airbrush and black paint (you'll probably have to thin it about 1:1 with water), blacken the eye sockets, nose, and any other small details that would normally have some shading. It doesn't need to be "correct" shading-- something dramatic looking is fine. You also don't need to worry too much if you overspray or something, it'll all blend in before we're done. You can let the black dry a little bit and do a bunch of skulls at once if you like.



The wash technique will be pretty familiar to those of you that have done tombstones before. We'll start with the (very) watery brown wash and using a ~1" brush basically just slather the wash all over the skull. Don't worry about even color-- just get everything wet.



Now, while the skull is still nice and wet, we take the more tan/yellowish wash and using the 1" brush again apply it liberally on the skull. You can make it thicker in some areas and lighter in others for some nice shading variations. Again, no need to obsess about it-- it'll all blend in soon enough.



Take a smaller brush (I used a ~1/8" one) and mix up a little black paint with water-- about 3-5 parts water to 1 part black. While the skull is still wet from the previous washes, dab the black anywhere that there are cracks or other details on the skull. Capillary action will carry the black into the cracks and shade them for you. Some of the black will run out onto the skull-- no worries.



If you have too many black streaks, take your big brush and some of the brown wash and just break them up a bit.



Finally we get to use the airbrush again. With the dark brown wash start spraying the skull all over. The skull should still be very wet from the previous steps, so the airbrush is just about impossible to mess up-- spray all over and just generally darken the skull and 'dirty' it up. You can also just blow air with the brush and move the paint wash around if you need to.



That's it-- just let it dry and when it's done you'll have a nice 'worn' looking skull. As it dries you can use the black wash and the brush to dab additional black into the cracks and bumps and get darker results. You can also repeat the process multiple times (or vary the amount of paint in the washes) to get darker results or however you prefer.



A spray varnish (matte or satin) will help waterproof the finished skull and restore a little shine to it. I would recommend covering the eye sockets and nose when using the varnish-- 'shine' in there doesn't look quite right.

You can switch colors or add some gloss on the teeth or even do some dry-brushing if you like to add more detail.

It's easy to get an assembly-line going and have several skulls in various stages of drying-- keep adding darker shades and whatnot for different looks.

Hope this is useful to someone. It gives pretty nice results and you can really crank 'em out once you get the hang of it.

-Clay

Just a couple other pictures--

Here's several in process... You can see how you can easily vary the shading and coloration:



...and this is just a nod to a really cool piece of painting equipment-- the Graco ProShot. It's basically a hand-held airless sprayer. Will spray latex straight from the can without any dilution or anything. It's a "pro" painter thing with a price tag to match, but it's pretty cool for painting "whatever" very, very fast. Pray that your local graffiti taggers don't find out about it.

(There's videos up on YouTube if you search for "Graco ProShot".) It took longer to clean up than to paint all these:



-Clay

Looking good