20 replies to this topic

[karpouzian]

I've purchased the four paint sets from the kickstarter... What other flesh tones should I purchase?

[buglips*the*goblin]

A lot depends on your preferences as a painter, and those sets give you a lot to play with. So my only two recommendations, based on my own tastes and experience (yours may vary), would be:

29823 caucasian flesh to cover the gap between fair skin and tanned skin, and

9071 chestnut brown as something to use as a flesh shade if you're working from dark to light with your highlighting. Chestnut brown has the advantage, as a shader, to giving tanned, fair, and caucasian a healthy slightly-pinkish tone on the shade coat that looks natural.


That's assuming you'll be mixing a bit. Otherwise, what you'd want to do is look up the triads for the colours you're getting - so for fair skin you'd want the fair skin triad, same for tanned skin, and then look at the other flesh triads.

It really depends on what you'll be going for, how much work you want to do (or save) getting there, and how many different varieties of skin you want.

[Citrine]

Personally I prefer the rosy skin triad for caucasian babes, tanned skin for outdoorsy or manly types.

[Lastman]

I posted about non-caucasian skin painting awhile ago. A little search-fu should turn up that post if you set the search range to the max date.

[Furongian]

I often use Chestnut Brown as a flesh basecoat, then layer with a mix of Tanned Skin and Rust Brown, and highlight with Tanned Skin. This gives you a nice ruddy complexion that I like to use on my dwarfs.

[Adrift]

Blue goes nicely as a base coat color for anything pale and undeadish.

[MonkeySloth]

Yes, if you use blue as an undercoat and don't use a flesh tone with more red in it as your base you'll get an anemic look. Here are two links to this effect on my WIP thread. Thefirst has more red as his base skin tone but that was offset by the blue undercoat.

http://www.reapermin...129#entry610129

http://www.reapermin...567#entry615567

Now if you combine this with a more sickly skin tone set (yellows and greens) you could get some interesting effects.

[Qwyksilver]

My first question would be...What other tones of flesh do you plan to paint?

Otherwise...any paint can make a flesh tone. Just depends on the race, planet/plane of origin, etc.

[Pingo]

Do people use layering and transparency to build up flesh tones, or is it mostly premixed opaque colors carefully blended?

My favorite approach to flesh (but not one I've used on minis yet) is the classical early Renaissance technique: a grisaille in shades of soft clay green and white, then hatched over with translucent layers of pure pink and light orange and yellow, which the underlying green mellows into a very convincing flesh tone.

[Qwyksilver]

Do people use layering and transparency to build up flesh tones, or is it mostly premixed opaque colors carefully blended?

Yes. Although I would bet the latter is more common.

[MonkeySloth]

That's about the only way I paint skin. If you want to see someone use grisaille on a miniature look for the Kinetic 7 post I made a few weeks ago. There's a step by step guide on a miniature.

[buglips*the*goblin]

I try to layer, but truthfully I often get bored doing it and tend to gradually thicken my paint until it might as well be near opaque. Then, overwrought with shame at what I've done in my quest to be efficient, I find myself trying to cover up using targeted glazing.

See, what catches me out is that layering doesn't always produce a strong visible instant result - and I tend to forget (despite the fact I should know better) that the layer will be more visible once dry.

I am proud, however, that I have learned to avoid the temptations of the Devil Drybrush and now just use that where materially appropriate. There's hope for me yet. Maybe not a lot, but some.

[Don Rodolfo Graziani]

Golden skin is the ONLY skin triad.
Or maybe I'm just being obsessive.
Seriously, I'm with Qwk. Anything can be used as a skin tone. I've already used a lot on my non-human friends.

[CashWiley]

See, what catches me out is that layering doesn't always produce a strong visible instant result - and I tend to forget (despite the fact I should know better) that the layer will be more visible once dry.

This is one of the strongest lessons I've learned painting the McVey Drone. So many times I went over something thinking it was going to be too subtle, then when it dried and I put it in the photo box is was far more visible than I'd intended. That's going to take a while to get used to.

I've got something I hope will be cool for the Bones Ogre, but it will most likely be a rush job. I want to get that out and then work through a couple L2P kits before I get too deep in new minis. The mini after that string of rushes I hope to paint slow again (not that I'm capable of painting fast!), and really pay attention to building slow layers, even if I have to photo between every coat to judge how the paint really went on until I can see it in hand more easily.

[karpouzian]

So, aliens, demons, orcs aside, for a caucasian human, what are people's 'go to' skintones?