A Quick Guide To Painting Faces

[Tim C]

Materials Used

Elf Flesh
Dwarf Flesh
Dark Flesh
Skull White
Chaos Black
Black Ink

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It's All In The Shading

Here is a brief article on how I paint my faces. The model in question is Celeborn which to be honest is not the best mini to feature as the sculpt is very soft. Being Elven he should have a light complexion but at this scale that gives us a problem as to keep it that way means that when finished the face will look quite flat so as with all my faces I deepen the colour just a bit more.
As the title says it literally is all in the shading but equally a a good foundation is needed to. Firstly I have base coated the mini with Elf Flesh, I needed to do this two to three times to cover the primer solidly.

then I apply a wash of Dwarf Flesh, what this does is set some definition to the face showing ares that are to be shadowed and highlighted.

Now we start to deepen the shadows, this is done gradually by adding small amounts of Dark Flesh and working deeper into the shadowed areas.

Shadows are darkened further by adding still more Dark Flesh to the Dwarf Flesh.

This is a good point to add the eyes. Eyes make or break a face so if you are not confident there is nothing wrong with just painting a dark slit between the eyelids, however if you are up to it then paint a black line inbetween the eyelids.

Next paint an even thinner line over the black trying to leave a little black showing, (Just like I didn't lol).

The pupils are now dotted in with a very fine brush. Chaos Black is my first choice for this but if that doesn't work as it didn't for me then try using black ink very carefully. Celeborn has snake eyes at this point which I fixed after this image was taken. The reason for doing the eyes at this stage is that it is much easier to fix any mistakes now rather than leaving the eyes until the end when your face is all nicely finished and then splodging black paint where you don't want it and ruining your hard work.

Now Highlight To Taste

Now the easy bit, simply highlight the face up, starting with a mix of 60/ 40 Dwarf Flesh to Elf Flesh and keep going until you are using just pure Elf Flesh sparingly. And that is really all there is to it.

I hope that this short article from me has been informative and that it may benefit you all in some way in the future.

[dogfacedboyuk1]

A good tutorial subject.- this is a daunting task for new painters and often the hardest part of the mini to do well (at least for me!). I still need to master this myself as my face painting sucks!

[magie]

Thanks Tim. I'm still a bit reluctant to paint faces, but this definitely helps

[jabberwocky]

Thanks Tim for putting this little tutorial together for us mere mortals! Very much appreciated .

[bruenor]

I agree, good little Tute.....shows what you really can achieve with faces.......(I said faces...settle down at the back!)

[scarecrow4560]

Since my current projects are actually human, i'll be sure to try this out.