1). Red Hair can be challanging for the novice.
The thing to keep in mind when rendering red hair on your mini is to use a pallette that is somewhat muted. Muted coloring will appear more natural. Using intense/bright colors will look unnatural and cartoonish. Thats ok if your doing an unnatural creature like a demon and thats the effect you want. But on most mini's very bright red hair will look undesireable.
2). I mix my own coloring for red hair, since I find the hues that the paint manufacturers currently produce unsuitable for the look I want. I start out with a middle toned to light toned brown. I don't always use the same brown sometimes I switch. Some colors I use are Reapers' Hawkwood or Oiled Leather or GW's Bestial Brown. I usually use one of the Reaper colors since Bestial Brown is just a touch to intense and dark. But I do use it if I want the hair a bit on the dark side. Now I will mix in a bit of yellow. When choosing a yellow it is important not to use a very intense pure yellow. I use Reaper's Desert Gold almost exclusively for this step. I like it because it is not to intense and not to light. Some of thier other yellows are either to bright which would look unnatural or to light which would look to pastel. GW's yellows are to intense and saturated for this step. The GW's Leprous Brown is about the most acceptable but even this color is to saturated.
We are only using the yellow to lighten our base color up and to add a little bit of body to the base color. Also we will be using the yellow to shade and highlight the hair. After we have lightened the brown up a touch now we can tint the color red. (we are painting red hair aren't we). :-). OK heres where I use a nice intense and clean red. Since the browns and yellows we use are muted if we add a "dirty red" to our base color our final color will be to dirty looking. And we are using the red to tint our base color over to the red side. So again a nice clean red is best. For this I like to use GW's Blood Red. Though I do use Vallejo's Vermillion or some of the lighter Reaper Red's also. Just add a touch of red to your brown/yellow mix. Be careful the red is overpowering a little is all that is needed. We are trying to mix up a color that looks like brown with a reddish tint.
3). Base coat the hair. Please thin the paint out a touch with water. It is far better to base coat the hair with a couple (or even more) thin coats than with one thick coat. You should be striving to achieve a nice even base coat without clogging up the fine details the sculptor painstakingly carved in.
4). After the basecoat has dried thoroughly. Take some of the base color and darken it with a darker brown. It is ok to use an intense and saturated brown here. It is even desirable to give the hair better contrast. I like to use Ral Partha's African (sadly out of production). But GW's Scorched Brown is also good.
5). Make a wash with this darker color. And wash the hair. Also line the edge of the hairline if you wish. When making washes I like to use water with either Future Floor Wax or Rubbing Alcohol added to decrease the surface tension of the water. This will cause our wash to flow better into the details and run off the high points better like we want washes to. There is a difference to the effects Future will create and the effect Alcohol will make in washes. Future Floor Wax is really just pure Acrylic (with some minor additions for fragrence etc.). Future will make paint flow better however it tends to dry a touch glossy. This can be of good use when we want a glossy look. (like on Plate Armor, Jewels, etc.)
So keep this in mind.
Alcohol on the other hand will dry matte. And it will speed up the drying time of the wash because it evaporates faster than water. Keep this last part in mind. When using pure water for washes the water tends to runoff the crevices before the wash completely dries. Water mixed with Alcohol will dry faster reducing this runoff time. This means that your wash should be drying more in the details where you want it to. Rather than speading into places you don't want it to be. Of course this spreading doesn't happen all the time but in areas where the detail is shallow it can be a problem.
6). Now we can go back to our base color and lighten it a bit with our mute yellow. Dry Brush the Hair or paint the individual strands for our middle tones. Just leave some of the darker base where the shadows would naturally be. I try to do as little dry brushing as possible on my figures. Because dry brushing is a random application of paint and I'm a control freak. I like my paint to go where I tell it to. I am a bully to my paint in this way. :-). Seriously I do try to limit my dry brushing because the paint does go on in a random pattern while directly shading with the tip of the brush looks much more controlled and neater. Though I do dry brush textures if it just isn't practical to paint with the tip of the brush. I do paint individual strands of hair when I can. I will paint anything with the tip of the brush in the conventional manner before I resort to dry brushing.
7). Lighten the color we used in the last step some more with the yellow and paint in the highlights. You can lighten this up further for the extreme highlights. Sometimes I go all the way to the pure yellow for the most extreme highlights. Yeah I know we are doing red hair not blond so why take it all the way up to yellow? Well because I think it just adds impact going that extreme and it looks cool. :-) Hey we are just trying to paint a beautiful figure so why not if it looks good? Of course I don't go this far on all my red heads. It just depends on what I think will work best.
8). All of this is just meant to be used as a guideline. Truth is I don't do it exactly this way all the time. As an artist I am constantly exploring new techniques and colorations. The above is the basic way I do it. But sometimes I will switch the yellow for a mute orange. Sometimes I don't wash with the burnt umbers. The point is, is that this is an art form . In Science 2+2=4. Fortunately as artists we do not have to deal with such constraints. (Such non-conformists we artists are). Experimentation and innovation are the ingrediants for good Art.
Play with the recipe for red hair I just laid out. Andfind what suits you best.
