Santa's Workshop

In Your Face

Alright kiddies, SANTA'S BAAACK! He's taken some time out of his busy schedule of learning to be a skinkmaster to sit down and write something (actually I'm taking pity on our newsletter after a dearth of articles). Actually Santa's e-mail site has been over 30 miles away, much too far, but just in the past few days he got jacked back in to the pipeline.

Anyway, I thought I'd start out with a simple but fun article, so I settled on painting faces. Primarily, I'm talking here about 25mm human Caucasian, but I have a few things to say about others as well. To begin, my mentor taught me when doing a figure, always start with the face, as this should inspire you to finish the rest of the figure. True, but it is also the logical starting point, as in proper painting technique, you paint from the inside out. In other words, you start with the flesh, then jacket, pants, etc and work your way out to the belt, shoes, etc. Also with faces, you want to shade the low points and highlight the high spots.

To start, I use Ceramcoat medium flesh. I simply paint the face up to the hairline, but don't forget to paint around the sides as well, getting the neck and the ears. The next step that I do is entirely wash the flesh with Citadel's flesh wash. They don't make their washes anymore, but I think that this one is still available. If not, use Chestnut Ink, maybe throw a little flesh tone into it if you prefer. You can also use brown ink, or a wash of paint, such as burnt umber or burnt sienna, whatever your heart desires. Once this is dry, I go back and recolor the high spots with the flesh tone I started with, areas such as forehead, chin, cheeks, ears, etc. Always remember to leave the low spots alone. Leave a fine dark line between the very top of the head with the hairline. Other areas of note are the creases on either side of the mouth, around the nose, jaw line, and the cleft below the bottom of the lip. Once this is done, I use Ceramcoat Indiana Rose diluted down on the very top of the high spots. You can also use white diluted with some flesh tone- that's actually what the games workshop people generally use in their articles. Now you have both depth and highlight for the face.

The next step is the detailing of the face. Use the diluted Indiana Rose (if it hasn't all dried up yet), which is a very light pink, and add some deep red (just a touch) to form a diluted pale hot pink. Gently paint the lips with this. Next are the eyes. Using a 10/0 brush (I always have a sharp new brush for this job), fill in the eye socket with dark brown or burnt umber. Next, using white, paint the sclera, or white of the eye, leaving a fine circle of the brown surrounding it. That is the trickiest part of the eye. Follow this with a very fine dot in the sclera. It's ok if you touch the outer ring a little. You should have a circle inside of two sideways ovals. Next, to eliminate that drug crazed look(unless, of course, that's what you want, paint a fine line of burnt umber over the very top part of the white touching the pupil just a little bit. That should eliminate the staring look. Lastly, paint any moustaches, beards, what have you. If you really want to, put some eyebrows on too.

So far as other races, I've never done any Asians, so I can't help you there. To do dark skinned people, such as Zulus, I use a Burnt umber simply dry brushed over black, and then highlight accordingly. To do American Indians, I use some burnt Sienna added to my flesh tone. You can use the above technique with some modification to really well sculpted figures such as Essex, but overall, I do a thin wash of burnt umber over the flesh tone and just leave it at that. No, I don't paint eyes on my 15's- to each his own. Well, that's it for this installment-happy painting!