Painting: Flesh

[hawkwood]

In my humble opinion flesh is the most important part of any miniature which has any. Why? Because everyone knows what flesh looks like. Anyhoot here is how I paint flesh.

 

General Notes

1. this technique is based on a black undercoat

2. the brush is moistend before painting and a couple of brushfulls of water is added to the paint in order to make it flow smoothly.

3. always use the tip of the brush and pull backwards or downwards away from the point AVOID PUSHING

 

stage 1

the base colour

This is a mixture of two humbrol paints, matt khaki and scarlett, in aproximately equal parts. you can alter the final skin tone by adding more khaki you will move towards oriental, more scarlett moves you to native american and by adding a mid-dark brown you can move towards middle eastern/arabic skin tones.

 

stage 2

highlighting

next humbrol flesh is added to the mixture and painted on all raised areas of the flesh useing the minimal number of brush strokes make sure to leave all the recessed areas the original base colour.

 

stage 3

stage 4

stage 5

are all repeats of stage 2 adding more of the flesh colour at each stage (thereby lightening the colour ) untill at stage 5 you are useing a colour that looks more or less like the pure flesh colour. at each stage paint less of the miniature essentialy leaving a line of the previous darker colour and painting a higher point of the muscle or feature you are highlighting.

 

stage 6

pure white is now added to the mix to give a final highlight.

 

stage 7

the figure is prepared for any by painting said details such as eyes, open mouths, bionics black but hair is painted a dark shade of the hair colour.

 

finished figure

eyes are painted by putting a small dot of pure white eiter side of the eyeball being sure to leave plenty of black. hair is given a careful drybrush of a much lighter colour.

 

paint mixtures

mix 1

the khaki and scarlett mix ( left ) and pure humbrol flesh

 

mix 2

the first highlight shade that i used on this miniature

 

mix 3

the final highlight shade and all those inbetween

 

If anyone uses this guide to painting flesh i would love to see the results and if any of the "old hands" think ive forgotten anything or have anything to add please do. the aim of this is to help people just starting out so please do not be offended if i have overexplained anythig or stated the obvious.

 

Hope its helpfull

 

hawk

[hawkwood]

once you get fairly practiced it takes about 15 - 25 minutes per figure to paint the flesh obviously depending on the amount of flesh on the figure. normaly for rank and file i only do three shades and expect to finish three figures every two hours (compleate except for bases)

 

hawk

[tyrion31]

I use GW paints and this method over a black undercoat.

 

1. Dwarf Flesh

2. Flesh Wash

3. Dwarf Flesh Highlight

4. Elf Flesh Highlight

5. Elf Flesh + Skull White Mix Highlight

6. Paint Eyes Chaos Black

7. Paint Eyes Skull White

8. Add Chaos Black Line In Centre Of Eye

 

Hope this helps someone who uses GW paints.

:blink:

[LibrarianScrub]

for the eyes you could also use a micron pen as well. size pending on how big you want to make the eyes of course. i use the pens instead. i find that they provide a more uniform sized eye.