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OK so faces are definitely not my strong suit, so I've spent all weekend reading about how to paint them better. So anyways here is a weekend of reading and anhour of painting. If out have any tips or suggestions please let me know. Thanks!

The face looks great, although I'm not one for painting eyes in the model. If you notice he has bad lazy eye syndrome, and a lot of advice coming from the top pro painters out there is to skip doing so because the model is simply too small to really do the eyes any sense of justice or realism.

So if I were to not dot the eyes, would I just leave the eyes white or make it dark around the eyes?

Paitryn wrote:
The face looks great, although I'm not one for painting eyes in the model. If you notice he has bad lazy eye syndrome, and a lot of advice coming from the top pro painters out there is to skip doing so because the model is simply too small to really do the eyes any sense of justice or realism.

If the OP wants his mini painting to get better, he needs to tackle eyes at some point. They add a ton of atmosphere to a mini:




And they're not that hard when you practise. I find it much easier to paint the whites after the iris and pupil. then liquid mask that off and concentrate on the face.

Great looking face, although the hair could use some work, maybe a wash to tone it down a bit? And the eyes look fine to me, keep it up!

Pupils are hard enough, how in the world do you make the pupil small enough to make an iris!!! Liquid mask eh? I'll have to look that up. Anyways thanks for the comments so far!

Paint the eyes a dark colour first and then add in the whites as dots. You may need to clean up the eyes again after it, but it does make it easy and avoids the surprised look.

Good job, mate!

I, for one, am generally also against painting eyes. If you look at photos of people at the same distance as you look at the model normally, you will not be able to see the eye details.

Eyes at this scale should remain dark, or at most vaguely suggested in subtle greys (that's me speaking more as a professional canvas painter). Anything beyond that will, at best be an exaggeration, and will clash with the illusion of realism of the model.

Painting eyes in pure white is heinous sin of realistic painting, as the eyes are almost never truly white(for all intents and purposes you can regard that as "never").

Examples shown here are for top tier entries to the painting contests, not even in the same ballpark as a tabletop minis.
I have yet to see an army being played composed exclusively of GD entries, much less so played by their authors.

Don't worry about eyes, focus on the mini as a whole.

The eyes are likely painted that way for those ones too because they are intended to be seen larger like that.

The face looks pretty good!

Eyes can be difficult to paint but you have a good start here. Don't give up on painting them just because some people choose not to. They add character to the miniature. Yes you can't see them from across the table, however if you pick the mini up and take a closer look and you will certainly notice the detail. It all comes down to how much time you want to invest in painting your miniatures. I am no propainter and don't compete in GDs but I can still appreciate the results even for my tabletop minis.

Sometimes I use a Lamp with a built in magnifying glass if the miniature is smaller than 28mm heroic scale or if I want to place some colour onto the iris.


Just a quick comment on the hair, if you are going for blonde use browns for a base and straw colours to highlight, avoid yellow.

Keep up the good work!

Yeah, eyes are daunting at first, and your first few will have lazy eyes, but persevere, once you have the knack, eyes are simple.

There are plenty of great tutorials on the net as to how to do eyes, but they are one of those things that are so small that your painting gear really matters.

You need a dead fine brush, the better quality the better the results. I'd personally recommend the Windsor & Newton 7 series for miniatures.

They're v. expensive, particularly if you're used to buying the £2 or £3 brushes from GW, but definitely a worthwhile investment. They're sable, so they'll never lose their point, and the point really is tiny. Combine that with one of the lamps Asuryan mentioned and with practice eyes will be easy.

As for your model, good work on the face. It looks fine in the photo you posted, my only criticsim would be the hair is very bright!

Looks pretty good! The one thing I can say to help with eyes is to possibly use a fine black painting pen. Otherwise just be very careful with the pupils. Overall the face is very well done though.