It was all going so well. My SCE Underworlds warband has been progressing nicely. One model is finished and I’ve laid down some nice freehand ready for finishing on another (you can read that here). Finally, some paints I’ve been waiting for to paint the face of the third model and the final freehand arrived today. So what happened?
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail
I was excited to get my Scalecolor Flesh Paint Set. So excited that I cracked them open the same day I got them and started painting. On reflection, that was my mistake. I didn’t think through what effect and finish I wanted. I just assumed an effect given the paints and basically went at it with no plan. I had no idea in my head about what the finished face should look like. But if I did, it definitely wasn’t like this.
The Scalecolor Flesh Paint Set
I’m really pleased with this set. There are some really nice colours in it and the paints themselves are really nice. I had a bit of a mishap popping one of the bottles. I covered myself in paint but it’s a really great set.
I picked three colours. Basic Flesh as my mid tone, Light Skin as my highlight and Pale Skin as my final highlight. This was my second mistake. My mid tone was too light which meant my final highlight is far too light.
28mm faces
The issue with my colours is that colours have a size scale the same way shapes do. As things get smaller, they get less bright (because they reflect less light). This means that a very bright highlight colour for the face will look really weird. Pale Skin is a lighter colour than the highlights on the NMM for example. I just didn’t realise. Twice, as it turns out.
The slow motion car crash first time around
The model was black undercoated. This wasn’t going to help so I went over in grey with a wash and dry brush to get all the detail sharp. Next I lay down my mid tone and first highlights. Then I added washed shadows of Indian Shadow and African Shadow. Finally, I went back in to reinforce the highlights. It looked terrible. So terrible, in fact that I just gave it all a thinned wash of Seraphim Sepia to calm everything down. That was an improvement but it still looked very poor compared to the rest of the model:
Ok let’s press the reset button and start that again shall we?
I’m really pleased with these models so far and this face just really let’s things down. So I had a little think (far too little as it turns out). I realised that my paint was too thick. That was true actually but it still wasn’t the fundamental issue. So I went back in with thinner applications of the same paint and ended up here:
Oh no. I’d done it again. In fact, I’d done it again so much that I felt the right way to rescue the model this time was another wash. This time with Arabic Shadow from the ScaleColor set.
Compared to the first effort this is, marginally, better. It’s still not the same quality as the rest of the model though. The issue with faces, on top of this, is that the eye is drawn towards them. So they stand out if they’re good or bad. There’s no such thing as an ‘ok,’ face. It either makes or breaks a model and this is broken.
Fixing it
Righto, having painted the face twice I’m now going to put it to one side for a few days and come back to it fresh. I know I’ll start with darker tones and work up to a darker highlight than I have now. As an epitaph to this fail I went back to the box art on the GW site. Actually the face is really goofy in the official photos so I feel better than I did but I know this needs fixing!
