Righto after the photographic debacle of my last how I paint miniatures; layering step through (see it here, don’t laugh at the pics) I’m hoping this one is a bit more helpful. It’s also a topic that heaps of people struggle with. And I used to struggle with (and sometime still do). Flesh.
Flesh is something we see a lot of in miniature painting. There’s also an ‘out of the pot,’ way of doing a 4/10 job of flesh: Basecoat with a flesh colour, wash with something like Army Painter soft tone or Citadel Cadian Fleshtone and highlight with a light flesh tone. Well, how I paint miniatures is kind of like that only with more steps.
The main reason why painting flesh in three steps only gets you 4/10 is that skin has a huge number of colours in it. If I have a look at the back of my hand it has colours from pink, red, brown and orange to white (the dry patches my partner keeps saying are disgusting) and even grey blue (this weird colour dot I’ve had ever since I can remember). Three steps doesn’t cut it.
How I paint miniatures when layering is pretty simple. Each step is very easy. But there are lots of steps. The complexity and the difficulty comes in either having or acquiring the patience. Don’t forget, I don’t paint armies right now, I’m only painting for intrinsic motivation. Because I enjoy it. The dress I’m about to show you took me two hours. Not a huge amount of time but then, it’s not finished, and if you had a unit of 30 of these then two hours per dress wouldn’t be sustainable.
So, in essence, here the method to layering in how I paint miniatures…I lay down a mid tone. Then I work progressively darker colours onto progressively smaller and deeper areas of shadows. Then when I’m happy with that, I work progressively lighter colours into progressively smaller and more exposed areas of highlights. At the end of this walkthrough, there’s a bonus step which really pulls skin together.
When to layer?
When I’ve got a mini that requires it, I’ll do one of these, ‘How I paint miniatures,’ posts on wet blending as wet blending and layering work for different things. LAYERING works best for surfaces with lots of detail (skin being a great example because of the small folds and colour changes. Folded fabric is another example). WET BLENDING works best on large, flatter areas. I wet blend when I paint NMM (non metallic metal) for example. Or for flowing capes / tunics with large flat areas.
Ok, with all the admin out of the way, this is layering according to how I paint miniatures!
Stage One – the basecoat.
If you haven’t read any of the earlier posts, I’m painting Catrina from Morgue Miniatures (link here). She has been prepped (see here for the tutorial). Just as with the bone walkthrough, this stage is a simple two coats of a thin pre mixed colour. This lets the value sketch underneath show through but gives me a jumping off point for the shadows. In this case I used two layers of well thinned Basic Flesh by Scalecolor:
Stage Two: The Shadows
With the basecoat on, it’s time to start layering in the shadows. This means progressively darker colours in progressively smaller areas of shadow. I picked: Blood Red, Indian Shadow and African Shadow for my shadow colours and thinned them down significantly. Here’s what each stage looked like:
Once each of my three shadow layers are down, guess what? Do it again. By the time you’ve finished this step, you’ll hate your model and me and think it looks terrible. It does, but it won’t for long.
Stage Three: Highlights
With the shadows down, it’s time to go in the other direction. I picked two highlight colours (Light Skin and Pale Skin both from Scalecolor) and applied a very thin layer of Light skin and then a very thin layer of Pale Skin.
What’s next? Say it with me now…’Do it again.’
Bonus Stage: Smoothing it out
Ok here’s a stage that wasn’t in the bone method. When I paint flesh with the mid tone, shadows and highlights layering method, after the highlights go on it never looks smooth enough. So like to add a final step that really pulls it all together. My original base colour, the Basic Flesh in this case gets thinned beyond the consistency I’ve been using so far and applied over the top of everything except the lowest shadows as a filter to bring everything together:
How I paint miniatures; Layering. The results
It’s been a fun afternoon painting the bone and flesh colour on Catrina. Here are the results of the layering:
The extreme close ups don’t do her much justice but there are some rougher blends on the rear of the dress that I intend to cover with freehand anyway but I’m really pleased with her so far. The bone and flesh are really muted which will contrast nicely with the colourful flowers. I’ll bang out some simple shoes, hair and necklace before putting a bit more time into the flowers and the freehand on her dress.
Until then, comments always welcome!
One thought on “How I paint miniatures. Part Two: Layering (again). Flesh”