How to paint rich skin tones and their effect

I got a reader question the other day about painting rich colored skin tones. The best example I can think of it in my recent work has been my Deathwing Terminator Sergeant model. The skin is super saturated and rich in color.

So how did I get the skin tones like that?
To get this particular skin tone, I started with a light grey primer. This made it so my lighter colors weren't darkened down and it saved me from having to apply multiple coats to get good solid coverage. The light grey color is the perfect answer for me.

I think the base color really sets up the "feel" of the skin in the end. Here I used GW Dwarf Flesh as my basecoat. As skin tones go, it's fairly dark, but it's a vibrant color. Over that goes two passes with GW wash Ogryn Flesh. This also darkens it down some more. The last bit of shading I do is in the deepest recesses only like the eye sockets and around the neck joint and it's done with GW wash Devlan Mud. Once this is completely dry, this is where I start to build the highlights up from.

The next step is adding some of the original base color back in as highlights. I pick out some of the more prominent edges and surfaces to bring back up to the original base color. Places like the cheeckbones, nose and forehead.

The second and final highlight is done with another vibrant color, GW Elf Flesh. I thin it slightly and hit only the very upper portions of the face. The bridge of the nose, the top edge of the forehead and maybe a spot on the cheekbones. I don't go over every previous highlight again, I just pick out the upper portions for effect.


The reason I don't add white to the base color is because I don't want it to wash out. I'd rather use another lighter, rich color instead to keep the life in there. It also adds some variety to the skin tone overall and I don't just have different values of one color.

To finish off the whole thing, you can go the extra distance and paint on facial stubble or a shaved head look where appropriate.

Why painting skin muted or vibrant matters
While it might not seem that important, the look you give your skin tones will affect the overall look and feel of your army. By that, I mean painting your pale Dark Eldar models to look as though they've just come from a week long vacation at the beach doesn't convey that unhealthy, sick look to them. In this case, a more muted, pale look might be more effective in conveying that feeling to your models.

Want to make your Imperial Guard unit look fresh from their home planet? Give them nice, warm skin tones, clean uniforms and no battle damage. Everyone who looks at them will think they are fresh from recruit school. Give them pale skin tones, a little bit of weathering and next thing you know, you have a battle hardened squad that hasn't had a break from fighting in months.

Take a look at my Deathwing Sergeant vs my Black Dragon marine:


One of them looks like he is well fed and healthy. He looks vibrant and full of life. He might be a bit rugged and worn around the edges like any good guy should, but he looks alive. The other guy does not. He doesn't look quite as healthy and maybe even like something is wrong with him.

To add another aspect to my Deathwing model, the skin is saturated, but the armour is not. It gives him (the man inside the machine) a very real and life-like look where the armour looks lifeless and just mechanical. It also helps draw the focus to his face.

Skin tones might be a small part of the whole picture, but definitely matter
How you paint your skin tones is only a small part of the overall look you give your army. Other things will help reinforce the feeling you're going for or work against you. The trick is matching things up to point your viewers in the direction you want them to go.

You can get this saturated look with other colors as well. Just make sure they are rich, you don't wash them out by adding black, white or a complimentary color and try using a few different colors instead of multiple values of a single color. It can get way more complicated than this when it comes to painting skin tones, but this should get you started with a good tabletop result.

Make sure to check out these posts as they might help:
Painting shaved heads and facial stubble
Painting Raven Guard pale skin tones
Painting Dark Eldar skin tones

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If you've got any questions about something in this post, shoot me a comment and I'll be glad to answer. Make sure to share your experiences with painting different skin tones in the comments below!

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How to paint Eldar Dire Avengers grim dark style

I've decided to take a fairly dark approach to painting my Dire Avenger here. More often than not, it seems like Eldar are treated almost like cartoons and painted in very pure, clean, bright colors. Dark Eldar get the dark and brooding color schemes, but I don't see many "dark" Eldar schemes.

That being said, here's how I went about giving this guy a dark look to his armour and that grim dark feeling overall.

Priming and basecoating the armour
Like I mentioned, these guys always seem to be painted up pure in color. I wanted to see if I could step away from that with this guy. I primed him black and knew I was going to leave a good bit of that showing. I had no intentions of painting every armour plate blue and then shading it all. I decided just to leave it black.


There are four steps to his armour. Three if you don't count priming the model black. The first step then would be to go over the prominent armour plates with GW Regal Blue. You want to be neat in your application, but you're not going to apply it over the whole model. The next picture will break down the areas better. Once that dries, it's a single highlight of GW Ultramarine Blue on a select few places. The last step (#4) is a quick wash over the whole model with GW Asurmen Blue to tone it all back down. We want dark remember?

Where you paint and highlight the armour
With this guy, I didn't paint every surface of his armour. When it came time to basecoat him (the previous step 2), I only applied the GW Regal Blue in the areas where light would hit it. Think of it as though the armour were actually black and you would be highlighting it with the Regal Blue color. It's only done on the upper and visible surfaces of the model that an overhead light source would hit.


This picture here shows you what I mean. The orange areas are where I applied the basecoat on the right side of the model. The yellow areas are the "highlight." If you notice the yellow marked highlights are only on his shoulders, chest and upper portions of his arms. I skipped the highlights on the rest of the model. This helps draw attention to his head area. The white helmet doesn't hurt either.

The whole armour process takes no time at all. You can get away with it for a couple reasons. The armour is dark blue. It's dark enough that people think the visible black is just blue in shadow. To help that, the basecoat color fades easily enough into black that you don't need perfectly wet blended gradients on his armour. I didn't worry about the blending at all honestly.

Painting the helmet
The helmet does require some work though. For no other reason than it's white. Even then, I really only painted mine light grey and highlighted with a little bit of white around the face. I wanted the grimy look. I painted his eyes first with red and gave them a GW Devlan Mud wash to darken them slightly and clean them up. After that, I painted the inset portion of his face mask black and blended in some GW Foundation Adeptus Battlegrey. The helmet overall is where I put the majority of my work in this model.


When it comes to the white on the helmet, the first step is getting a good basecoat of light grey. A few thin coats is all it took over the black. Over that, I gave it a wash with Secret Weapon Soft Body Black (step 2). I went heavy so that it pooled around the back of his helmet as though grime had built up. Once that dried, I touched up the very front of his helmet with the original light grey color. The last step is to take some thinned out white and go over the face area to make it stand out. It doesn't have to be much, just enough to give the feeling that the helmet is white.


The rest of the helmet is detailing so to say. The freehand is done with a brush and some thinned GW Charadon Granite. I kept away from using black because I didn't want the high contrast there. I wanted it dark, but not black. Black just looks odd to me with these kinds of things.

The crest started out all black and I blocked in the "yellow" areas with GW Foundation Dheneb Stone. Again, since I was going dark and more muted with my color scheme, I kept away from using a nice, bright yellow here. Over the Dheneb Stone, I applied a thinned wash of GW Foundation Iyanden Darksun. This gave me a very slight yellow tint to the lighter portions of the crest. Not wanting it to be too yellow, I gave the whole thing a light drybrush of light grey to give me my muted highlights. I took the same light grey color and thinned down enough to carefully draw a series of parallel lines over the top of the crest.

Had I thought about it ahead of time, I would have cut the grooves in before priming so my drybrushing could pick them out and I wouldn't of had to add them in as a faux texture. The whole thing is finished off with a wash of GW Devlan Mud to darken down the light portions and tone down the highlights some.

Painting the odds and ends
His short back tabard is treated in the same manner as his helmet is except you skip the thinned white highlights at the end. All of the metallic bits are done with Boltgun Metal and given a wash of Badab Black. I opted to leave off any gold thinking he was more of a rank and file troop that wouldn't have any fancy trinkets.

His gems are all red for consistency and they're done with the standard approach. Start black, fade red up from the bottom and add a small white dot at the top.

Some weathering and basing
I did go over this guy with a couple weathering powders. I hit the black areas with a metallic iron and added some brown around his feet. Not much more than that. His base was given a basecoat of GW Foundation Khemri Brown and two drybrushes, one of Dheneb Stone and then one of Bleached Bone. A thinned wash of GW Gryphonne Sepia darkened down the cracks between the stones. The base also comes from Secret Weapon Minis.


And here's the final model. All in all, I'm happy with how he turned out. He's almost Dark Eldar looking because he's so dark. I prefer this much more than the bright colors I usually see Eldar done in. This make them look much more sinister to me.

But then I messed the whole model up
If you look at the picture above, you'll notice the bright yellow static grass I added in between some of the cracks in the stones. It pretty much ruined the model. To the point where I have ordered a basing "kit" with a variety of grasses and I'm going to redo his base the right way.

Lots of times we add resin bases to our models and just paint them up. This works 99 percent of the time. Sometimes though, I think you have to look at your resin base as a backbone to work from. It's what you use to add your grasses, snow, gravel, water effects whatever on top of. I missed that opportunity here. I had a good backbone, but I fell short in finishing off the base.

I'll redo the base and post up some new pics in the coming weeks as soon as my basing kit arrives. I'll show you the difference when you go the extra step.

Make sure to check out these posts as they might help:
Zenithal highlighting, a look at how to do it
Painting an Ork over a dark colored primer color (black)
Using metallic weathering powders

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If you've got any questions about something in this post, shoot me a comment and I'll be glad to answer. Make sure to share your experiences with using paint schemes that are darker than normal to get a more "menacing" feel to your models in the comments below!

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From concept to reality, 3 FTW member posts

Cruising the FTW blog rolls and internet this week, I found some interesting things from members who have used what they found on From the Warp to help them with their hobby. Stuff I figured I'd pass along to you guys to check out to see what they're doing with the info they pick up here.

FTW posts that were linked to:
How to paint Space wolves (in light grey armour) quickly
How to create an effective Necron scarab swarm base

If you've got a post on your blog that shows what you were able to do with something you picked up here and it links back to FTW, let me know about it so I can highlight what you're doing!

Painting Space Wolves quickly
When I posted my Space Wolf painting tutorial the other week, I figured it would get some response and there might be the occasional person who picked it up and tried it on their own. Army Undecided has done that very thing with his Space Wolf army painted up in a light grey like I did with my own test model.


Image from Army Undecided
I think he's got a great looking tabletop ready force. The thing I like most though are the bases. He's got grass and snow on the base at the same time and that's not something you see often. Most of the time we all leave the grass off when we add snow, I'm guilty of it myself.
He's got more pictures of his Space Wolves on his site

Forge World scarab swarm
Everyone gets the Forge World emails. Lots of folks repost it on their blogs too... enough that you don't really need to subscribe the the original email anymore.
This past week though, they released their version of a Necron Scarab Swarm (their pic on the right over there).
Honestly, I'm a little disappointed.

I like the old school look, but it doesn't say swarm to me. Not like their Tyranid ripper swarms do. Those say swarm to me. Maybe I just want more on the base to give me that feeling of a carpet of them scampering across the surface of the battlefield and four bugs just don't do it.

Some folks have taken my idea/technique and improved on it. Like Eye of Error did the other month with his scarab swarms and including some mechanical bits on his bases.


Image from Eye of Error
The addition of more scarabs along with a themed base makes all the difference in the world to me. It's finding those little things you can do to your army that matter. They don't have to be really complex or difficult to do, but it's a matter of finding the right touches. That's what makes the difference and Eye of Error hit the nail on the head with his swarms.
You can see more of his scarab swarm bases here.


Image from Narceron
Another reader, Narceron, has used resin and some old school metal scarabs to create something similar. He's still in the building process I think, but I'm hoping he really loads them onto his bases a well and doesn't just go with 3 or 4 on each base.

I know he has tons of these guys made already and I'm waiting to see how they turn out in the end.
You can see his progress post here.

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If you've used something you found on FTW and have linked to it in your post, let me know about it so I can share it with other folks out there! It's always cool to see how folks take something and make it their own.

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