Painting Blonde Hair

[Olaf the Stout]

I'm trying to give the mini that I'm painting blonde hair but I can't quite figure out what colour(s) to use to make the hair look blonde rather than yellow. I'm using the GW range of paints. Can anyone help me out?

So far I've tried painting it a brown colour and then drybrusing/highlighting it with Golden Yellow. The end result was less than impressive and did not look natural at all.

Thanks in advance,

Olaf the Stout

 

[Bront]

A yellow with whiteish highlights worked well back when I used to paint. Maybe find a goldish color (non-metalic), mix a little white in it for the base?

 

[Harsh]

How about a gold-yellow base, wash chestnut, then drybrush with gold-yellow and highlight with some light yellow and white.
You could also dab/streak some light orange here and there, but I would drybrush gold over that as well to blend it.

 

[WhatGravitas]

You may want to look here. There is a couple of tips for blond hair, but also for other things.

Cheers, LT.

 

[jaerdaph]

The real question is will that miniature now have more fun?

 

[Desdichado]

I'm not familiar with the current Citadel line-up, but I prefer using more tannish colors rather than overtly yellow. In either case, washing it with a medium brown—not too dark; you want this to look like shadows, not that the mini's dye job is overdue for renewal or that he's got an 80s style frosted tips thing going on—and highlighted back with a lighter tan again, seems to work for me. The only problem with this is you have to make sure you're not inadvertently using the same (or too similar) colors as your skin tones.

I like to experiment with different kinds of brown and brownish yellow, though, to get subtley different effects for different miniatures.

 

[Doug Sundseth]

I recommend doing a google image search on blonde hair. The range of base colors is wide, and the range of highlight and shadow colors is even wider. I sometimes find it useful to print out a picture of the kind of hair effect I'm looking for and to compare colors area by area.

One of the problems you are probably having is that most hair is highly reflective. The result is that you need to use techniques akin to those used in NMM (non-metallic metals) styles. Broadly, this means pushing your highlights and shadows farther than you are used to, but tightening up areas covered by the highlights more than you are used to as well.