With the Earth Elemental complete, it needed to be painted. Now to date every miniature or piece of scenery that I've painted that was supposed to resemble rock or stone. I painted grey. Without fail.
So this time round I wanted to try for a different stone colour, something like sandstone, anything but grey.

Stage 1

Anyway first up I sprayed the whole model with Games Workshop white undercoat. I expected the foam to soak up a lot of the paint but that didn't seem to happen. The undercoat covered the model well enough so I applied the first base coat.

Stage 2

I went with Chestnut Brown (coat d'arms 219) covering the whole model. I used a big brush and made sure I got paint into all of the cracks. Once I had got a nice even coat on the model I left it for a while to dry.
Although acrillic paints dry quickly the porous nature of the foam makes some areas dry quiker than others. So I left it for a bit longer. Once it was fully dry I decided to add a brown ink wash (coat d'arms 136). This I hoped would fill all the cracks and create some good shadowy contrast. Didn't work out that great again probably due to the foam. But it did serve the purpose of getting a few bits I missed with the paint and darken the base coat nicely.

Stage 3

I thought my best bet was to just keep drybrushing the model with lighter shads of the base coat. So I mixed the Chestnut brown with some Pale Sand (coat d'arms 522). I brushed this on but the colour was turning more like milk chocolate. So I decided to try dry brushing with the pale sand as is.

Stage 4

This dry brushing with just the pale sand worked out ok. So I applied another layer (keeping more paint on the brush second time round). I managed to get closer to the colour I wanted at this point, but thought it would benefit from a last bit of highlighting. So I used Linen (coat d'arms 233) as a final light drybrush and left it at that. I could have painted each rock a slightly different shade to make it look more realistic, but didn't have the time and this was for the tabletop not display cabinet.

Stage 5

Final touches were to flock the base and I also decided to put some flock on the model its self. As moss or other vegitation growing in the cracks in the rocks. I applied some standard PVA glue to parts of the model and pressed flock onto the glue to make sure it stuck.
As you can see I think the model came out very well for having been built and painted in a day (not to mention made out of foam!)

Stage 6

Another angle of the finished model. This process worked so well I decided to make more Earth Elementals. The picture shows two Rock Warriors made in exactly the same way as the elemental only the warriors are only 45mm tall. Sort of troll or ogre sized.
You can see lots more pictures of the Elemental and the rest of my rock army in the miniatures gallery section.