Rob's Painting Tips

How to Paint Skin

Step 1

First thing to do is get the mini cleaned up ie: fileing off all the mold lines. Next the mini is primed in this case to ensure strong colours the mini was primed white. I personally use GW brand white primer.

Step 2

Second step is the laying down of your base colours. I personally always paint the skin areas first since most of the time the face is the initial focus of a viewer and it's important to get it right [note if you start with the skin and screw it up, you don't have much to fix or redo]. In my colour palette I start skin with GW "Dwarf Flesh". I gave this a few hours to dry properly before the next step.

Step 3

Third Step is the wash stage. [If you don't know what a wash is, it's a thinned down mix of paint used in a thin covering layer. The wash flows into recesses and dries there in a deeper colour. With acryllic paints this is easy since you just mix your paint with water] Here the figure is washed over all the skin areas with GW "Vermin Fur". I gave this a day to dry totally before going to the next step [a few hours is usually enough].

Step 4

Now the paint job gets serious. I now go back to the base colour "Dwarf Flesh" and paint over all the raised areas, being careful to leave the shadow areas dark. You have to be fairly careful here to keep the paint thin and build it up gradually.

Step 5

This step is a continuation of the last step, again building up colour on the more raised areas, this time using GW "Elf Flesh". As you can see a fare degree of contrast is appearing now. For rank and file troops I wouldn't go further but since this was a character mini I go one step further.

Step 6

Here I have brought the highlights all the way up to white. I do this by thinning down some white and putting on the extreme highlight areas then blending the edges with "Elf Flesh" again.

For finishing touches such as lips I use a bit of red mixed with flesh colour.

Extreme dark areas ie: belly button, between fingers the mouth and eye sockets. I use GW "Skaven Brown" this is nice and dark and since brown is a tertiary colour it can be used on most colours as a shadow colour.

For the eyes I paint a horizontal white line filling the eye recess then I paint in the pupils [usually just black]. For this I recommend painting it down from the top of the eye in a half circle. Be VERY careful to line up the eyes or the mini will look weird, or cross eyed.

Here is the finished mini
"Sithris, Demon Princess"
by Reaper Miniatures.