[Tutorial] Jack's face painting tutorial

Ashton wrote:

next time you paint a face, could you take pictures of it at every stage ? I'd love to see how you do it.

Ok this is a quick tutorial I promised Ashton ages ago, showing how I go about painting faces. Hopefully you guys'll find it interesting.



First I apply a thinned-down coat of bronzed flesh to the face, making sure not to lose any detail. The next coat is a mixture of bestial brown and flesh wash, with a tiny bit of chaos black. The reason for this concoction is that I find flesh wash alone, can cause dark areas to appear shiny. The added black makes sure that the areas around the eyes and mouth are really dark.



Using bronzed flesh with increasing amounts of skull white, I go about highlighting the raised areas. I also use a mix of bestial brown and chaos black watered down, to paint in detail around the eyes, nose and mouth, such as wrinkles, nostrils, eyelids etc.

The eyes are tough, and take alot of trial and error I paint em white first, and then apply a black wash to give them a dark outline. The pupils can be really fiddly, but remember to try and position them near the top of the eye. If you can see white all the way around the pupil it'll usually look odd.




And here's the finished fella. Looking at him now, maybe I shoulda given him some adamantine claws. I highlighted his teeth with bleached bone, as well as the eyes, and I applied some thinned down blood red to his nose.

One thing to remember is that the human face is rarely just a uniform colour, areas around the nose and cheeks are often redder, while the forehead can appear more yellowy. On this character below, I used some thinned down shadow grey to represent stubble.



hope it helps

Wow, great! Thanks a lot! You managed to paint a beautiful face on a seemingly horribly undercoated mini. Thanks!

*moved to Tutorials section*

Great tutorial!
I'm eager to try this myself.

Quote :

You managed to paint a beautiful face on a seemingly horribly undercoated mini.

Why do you think so, cianty?
I guess the model was first undercoated in black, and then sprayed over with white.

It reminds me of the few times I used white GW primer. I sprayed my Hobgoblin Wolfboyz DOW with it and it was terrible. The colour was(is!) way too thick and covered details and now the miniatures have a crumbly surface.. :'( On the photos above it looks the same but you could be right, of course.