Painting Flesh

by Assistant Doc Slannesh

I've been experimenting with various brands and techniques of painting skin, and I do believe that I have come up with an extremely realistic looking skin technique. It works really well on figures with large amounts of skin exposed.

1) Basecoat the miniature with Model Master Acryl "Shadow Skin Tint"  paint. I found this paint to be a little thick, so I used an Acrylic Extender to thin it a bit.

2) Give the miniature a medium (slightly watered) wash of GW Chestnut Wash, and wait for it to dry completely.

3) Take the Shadow Skin Tint and do highlight. Make sure your brush is slightly wet so that you can smoothly blend the Skin Tint into the Chestnut wash. (I will refer to this as wet blending from now on - it takes practice, to so don't be discouraged if your first few attempts don't work out right).

4) Mix some Model Master Acryl "Warm Skin Tint" with the Shadow Skin Tint (I'd say about 1:1 mix). Do another level of highlighting. Again, a wet blend technique is very handy. You should be able to make "seamless" color transitions this way.

5) Take Warm Skin Tint (again, this is kind of thick, so I used extender again), and wet blend it onto a smaller area for another highlight.

6) Mix some Warm Skin Tint with Polly S "Human Flesh" (It's VERY light, almost a yellow tint" and do another highlight. By now your highlights should be rather small, so you won't need a lot of this mix. The wet blending will also become more difficult do the small size of blend required.

7) For the final highlights (i.e. tops of knuckles, tip of nose etc.) I use a tiny dab of Human Flesh.

There you have it. As I said, it takes a lot of practice to get this technique working properly. Once you've figured out how to do it, you'll be very pleased with the results.