Step 1: Basecoat Olive Brown

Start by giving the leather areas 2 thin coats of Olive Brown. You don't have to be super clean with the finish as we're going to be adding imperfections as we go, but you do want to cover any overpaint from other areas of the model.

Step 2: Layer English Uniform

Using the most destroyed brush that you can still get reasonable control with at this scale, start building up some highlights. I like to do this in three stages: an all-over drybrush to establish a basic level of coverage and pick out most of the details; stippling to create some texture; and, using a less ruined brush, an edge highligt just to make sure nothing's been missed. You can also add some long lines to represent scratches, I find these work best if they curve over folds in the marerial.

With the exception of the scratches, you can go pretty heavy on all of these since we'll be adding more delicate detail in the later steps.

Be aware that English Uniform looks a lot more yellow when it’s wet compared to when it’s dried, so while it may feel like a large step in value as you’re painting it’s actually not that as significant as it seems.

Step 3: Layer Brown Sand

Here we repeat the step 2 but much more gently and with a lighter colour. This time the drybrushing should explicitly focus on edges and highlights, and the edge highlighting should aim to be sharper. If you do want to add scratches, keep them to the more prominent folds to keep the lighting feeling natural. If you have the brush control, it's very effective to paint over part of the length of one of the scratches from the previous step.

Step 4: Highlight Dark Sand

Using Dark Sand, we create bright highlights on the edges and the sharpest folds. We enhance the battered nature of the leather by using lots of small irregular marks along the edge rather than the single smooth line that is more common in edge highlighting.

You can also add a few small scratches, again linking them up with the longer scratches if you can. These marks should be small, but not quite the smallest you can make as we’ll be adding one more set of highlights on top.

Step 5: Wash Agrax Earthshade / Rhinox Hide

For some applications you can pretty much call the leather complete at step 4. However, since my Depth Guard have predominantly white armour I want the leather to be darker so that it contrasts better.

For hero models I recommend glazing Rhinox Hide into the recesses (about a 5:1 water to paint ratio tends to work well for me, but you may have to experiment a little to find the right ratio for your specific paint and technique). However, for the rank and file I want something quicker and more consistent, so a simple was of Agrax Earthshade is my usual go-to.

Step 6: Draw the rest of the Owl

The last step is to do one more highlight pass with Dark Sand. We do this after the wash / glaze stage so that we have the opportunity to fix any mistakes and revitalise any highlights that got knocked back too far. We’ll particularly want to focus on the points of folds and corners.

Once you’ve painted the rest of the model, your job’s done!