Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I'm curious how often most war gamers add non Caucasian troops to their units when painting them up. I've made it a conscious effort for as long as I can remember to paint some of my troopers up with African, Asian, Latin, ect... skin tones. I'm wondering how many other people do that.

It bothers me when I look at Games Workshop's officially painted armies and product shots and I see only Caucasian troopers except in the units that are specifically non Caucasian. Other companies do this too sometimes.

I don't care about political correctness but it smacks me as very unrealistic. It also isn't doing much to promote the hobby outside of the non white male population.

I'm not flame bating or trying to start some kind of race debate. I just want to know how many other gamers paint non Caucasians into their armies and collections.

It bothers me when I look at Games Workshop's officially painted armies and product shots and I see only Caucasian troopers except in the units that are specifically non Caucasian.

Maybe the Caucasian soldiers are specifically Caucasian, just as these non Caucasian ones are specifically non Caucasian. Now I refer to models like Cadian Shock Troops, Catachan Jungle FIghters, Vostroyans, Eldar (dark and regulars), certain Space Marines (not White Scars and Salamanders).

But I totally get your point.

^There are dark-skinned Catachans in GW material.
It's ultimately up to the painter to decide what their models look like, in this respect GW's idea of what things could look like is unimportant.

This is 40,000 years into the future of human space colonization, most natives eg Cadians would have the same skin tone. This would vary mostly from travel between planets which is relatively rare compared to the ease of airplane travel today.

Most of my flesh-colored models have generally the same color flesh.

Differences in wash strength and how much I want to mix paints on a given day creates a reasonable amount of variation

ph34r wrote:This is 40,000 years into the future of human space colonization, most natives eg Cadians would have the same skin tone. This would vary mostly from travel between planets which is relatively rare compared to the ease of airplane travel today.

Why would they have the same skin tone over an entire planet when even our planet isn't the same skin tone after 6000 years? Human's skin tones adapt to the radiation levels hitting them, so realistically, as every planet has some type of equator like zone, their skin would be much darker than Caucasian if hundreds of generations lived there. Even the Inuit people who live on the poles of our planet have darker skin because it's an adaptation. I agree with the OP and I try to diversify my army as much as possible since it seems more true to the IP where everyone in the Imperium is fighting for survival. Women are the hardest to come by though.

DemetriDominov wrote:Women are the hardest to come by though.

Which would be my problem. I'm still waiting for the models to come out, but when they do, I'm planning to have a mixed force of Caucasians, African-Americans and Latin-Americans.

This article is one I found while wondering what Vallejo paints would work best.

DemetriDominov wrote:Why would they have the same skin tone over an entire planet when even our planet isn't the same skin tone after 6000 years?

Wait...what?

I paint all of my Space Wolves White. I do it because they're vikings. I plan on doing something different with an IG army that will be based on an ice planet. I think I'll try to do something racially and sexually proportionate to the general population in that case.

Not to mention how potentially touchy people can be about it when it comes to who you pick off for casualties...

Ironworker wrote:I'm curious how often most war gamers add non Caucasian troops to their units when painting them up. I've made it a conscious effort for as long as I can remember to paint some of my troopers up with African, Asian, Latin, ect... skin tones. I'm wondering how many other people do that.

It bothers me when I look at Games Workshop's officially painted armies and product shots and I see only Caucasian troopers except in the units that are specifically non Caucasian. Other companies do this too sometimes.

I don't care about political correctness but it smacks me as very unrealistic. It also isn't doing much to promote the hobby outside of the non white male population.

I'm not flame bating or trying to start some kind of race debate. I just want to know how many other gamers paint non Caucasians into their armies and collections.

I play orks, so well...

n0t_u wrote:Not to mention how potentially touchy people can be about it when it comes to who you pick off for casualties...

Paint give a fre models a red undershirt so that stops being a problem, then after that its fair game who kicks the bucket. So long as you have a racially equal proportion of redshirts, even the most pedantic person will have to accept it.

More seriously, I just paint whoever I want. I always make sure I have one grizzled black sergeant/officer, and one grizzled white one. I'm thinking of altering those models so that when I put them together they are grasping hands and tensing. Perhaps on a base which looks like its suffering massive earth tremors? But apart from Dillon and Dutch, its just a smattering here there and everywhere, although they tend to be pale white in general, but thats just because a) I suck at painting skin and b) my army is recruited from a world which has large natural spires, and for some reason I equate the high up people with pale skin. Now that I think of it being closer to the sun would probably increase exposure to radiation, but hey, its my army so the physics of that world obeys MY command.

I'm doing my first ever sci-fi army, which is vanilla Space Marines. I like my marines with their helmets on, so this isn't a huge issue. However, I'm doing a 10-man squad of Scout Snipers at the moment, and I'm making a conscious effort to make it racially diverse. This is partly a desire to not have a Pure Aryan army, but also as practice for doing skin tones.

Even if an army is supposed to be all Caucasian, there should still be a fair amount of variety in skin tones.

@OP: play salamanders; problem solved

@motyak: pale skin for spire dwellers seems pretty reasonable to me. hab stack life doesn't afford one with a wealth of sun bathing opportunities :p

beezley1981 wrote:

DemetriDominov wrote:Why would they have the same skin tone over an entire planet when even our planet isn't the same skin tone after 6000 years?

Wait...what?

.

That's about as far back as written human history goes, after that everyone was generally the same color: Black, and slightly less Black, because we all lived in Africa and Mesopotamia

I painted an Astral Claws (2500pts) for a tournament. Sadly I've no photo's of it as I sold it all on Ebay after the tournament (litterally painted up just for the weekend!). All the flesh showing models were coloured skin tones.

More recently, I've painted up a SDE set and completely mixed the hero's skin tones from very dark to very light.

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/447052.page

@motyak: pale skin for spire dwellers seems pretty reasonable to me. hab stack life doesn't afford one with a wealth of sun bathing opportunities :p

It's not a conscious decision to not paint them non-caucasian.
It's because I see it as irrelevant after a further 40,000 years of "genetic blending".

I don't think about it that much, tbh.

When even the Pacific Islanders I game with paint their guys up as whitey, then it hardly makes it a huge deal.

For me it's simply a matter of painting. "White" skin is quite easy to paint to a degree that it looks believable and has enough contrast to be easily seen from a distance.

Dark skin varies wildly in shade even within the same demographics of ethnic backgrounds.

It's hard to paint a model with dark skin that shows stark contrast, even up close. This makes it look like there is only one color on the skin from tabletop distance.

In every case for me it hasn't come up. I've done Empire, High Elves, Dark Elves, Lizardmen, Bretonnians. None of those armies have dark brown skin. The beastmen I'm doing now have brown skin but I'm not sure that the recipe would work well on a human model. Perhaps I'll have to try it out on a Marauder model to see how it goes.

How many people paint white skin on some of their Dark Elf figures?

Personally, I paint my Space Marines with various skin tones because I see no reason for them to look all the same. Most of them wear a complete armor, so we can figure they're the color we want ^^, but for those that are barehead I try to give them different skin colors.

For exemple one of my Land speeders pilot has a brown face, while the gunner on another one has a very pale skin :



One of my terminator sergents (in front left of the picture) has a dark skin (darker than the speeder's pilot) :



(click on pictures to see them bigger)

These are some exemples, my other squads also have "coloured" people in their ranks. However, I don't have any "asian like" guys because I didn't find a good color scheme for this yet. ^^

Kilkrazy wrote:How many people paint white skin on some of their Dark Elf figures?

I paint most of them caucasian(where the feth is caucasia? never been there yet I get tagged as it) with a blue wash before highlights.

The fact that you need to buy extra color for differenet skin tones doesn't help if you're on a low budget either.

But apart from Dillon and Dutch,

Hehehe, I have Apone running around as Sarge in my Bloodclaws squad.

I always add non-Caucasians to my Tau Fire Warriors

Ratius wrote:

But apart from Dillon and Dutch,

Hehehe, I have Apone running around as Sarge in my Bloodclaws squad.

Ha, brilliant. I'm working on doing Indian skin so I can have Billy. He'll be holding a big knife with a lasgun on the ground. Eventually I'll have the whole squad plus one or two others. Dutch will have to cease to exist though, and will become Matrix instead so I can use him as Harker. Can anyone say 'best squad ever'?

Any plans to sub in Anna?

When I was little, we found a man. He looked like - like, butchered. The old woman in the village crossed themselves... and whispered crazy things, strange things. "El Diablo cazador de hombres." Only in the hottest years this happens. And this year, it grows hot. We begin finding our men. We found them sometimes without their skins... and sometimes much, much worse. "El cazador trofeo de los hombres" means the demon who makes trophies of men.

A planet does not necessarily have a stable orbit like Earth, nor is does it prevent population from intermingling like Earth's nations do. With a common ethnic origin on many Empire planets as well as living conditions that do not typically encourage exposure to varying degree of UV, who is to say that an entire planet is not homogeneous in their aesthetics?

Aerethan wrote:

Kilkrazy wrote:How many people paint white skin on some of their Dark Elf figures?

<snip>(where the feth is caucasia? never been there yet I get tagged as it) <snip>

I believe it's from the Caucasus mountains range, and also the original term caucasian was also interchangeable with europid, according to the infallible wikipedia. </offtopic>

Into my space wolves im having a conscious effort to make them diverse. Due to the "Space Vikings theme", they will be most caucasion with blonde and red hair, but i plan to have some tan and brown skin in there.

My wolves dont like to wear helmet you know, those mechanic things on it dont let them use their senses the right way...

varl wrote:@OP: play salamanders; problem solved

It would have been at one time, but these days the Salamanders are no longer of 'African' style black skin, but instead fantasy-type jet-black skin with red eyes (just to finally make the distinction clear).

Some other games have non-white units, this Massai Moran for Infinity Nomads for instance

I know a guy that did an IG Penal legion all in orange clothes and all of them Black (African American for the PC crowd). Everyone just gave him that 'have you lost your mind' look and suggested he repaint them.

My IG are British based. My orks are blue skinned (methane world mutation). My Marines are are washed with a dark tan skin. I'm currently working on a Japanese themed army.
But most people go with Caucasian because that is the paint color produced by GW.