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So, the vast majority of armies you see have their skin painted in the basic white caucasian style, with the occasional smattering of African-African deep black skin in armies like Talllarn IG, and I think that's kind of a shame since there's actually a very wide variety of different potential skin tones an army could use... I think a lot of Imperial Guard, Space Marine etc. armies would be more interesting if they used something a little bit different... after all, you often get people who put a lot of effort into having a unique paint scheme and such, but then simply go for the "deafult" skin when it comes to painting faces and the like. I found a pretty cool CoolMiniorNot article about painting various shades of skin, and I wondered if anyone else had tips to share, models with 'different' skin (either theirs or just ones they know and like) or anything else related to this. Who knows, somebody might even read this and be inspired to paint their figures a little differently!
(apologies if i offended anyone with this post; that was definately not my intention - I'd love to see more models painted Mexican or Polynesian or Chinese or Scandinavian or even Albino... you get the idea.)

I was just thinking about this the other day. I still wonder why people don't paint there mini's different skin colors. Most likely because Caucasian is one of the most known way of painting mini's.

It depends on the models as well. Most models in the GW line are very European looking in their features so are best painted as such. Also most armies tend to be more western themed, the main human armies I personally collect are space pups and bretonnians, so painting them anything other than "white" never crossed my mind, though for Harad I considered a few different tones, but never actually got around collecting them.

Yeah, I guess it's a lot to do with the fact GW portrays 99% of the "Immensely varied legions of the Imperial Guard" with Caucasian skin. The paint range seems like it's geared towards only painting the same kind of flesh shade too, as well as the miniatures... but it would be nice to see some asian-style IG... with the prominency of China right now I'm almost suprised it isn't a little more common.
I will see if I can find some examples of miniatures painted like this later.

Wow, thanks for the link. I've been thinking to add color (no pun intended) to my IG models. I just learned while ago to paint light skin tones acceptable level. it will be challenge for the get few Darker shades.

It can be problematic - I knew an IG dude who had a platoon of un-upgraded guardsmen who he used as cover. He codenamed them 'platoon human shield' and they all had african skin.

Phototoxin wrote:It can be problematic - I knew an IG dude who had a platoon of un-upgraded guardsmen who he used as cover. He codenamed them 'platoon human shield' and they all had african skin.

Never thought that, but if you paint 1 or 2 guardsn´men african skin tones and 1 hispanic, rest caucasians, then it shouldn't be much of an problem... Of course there are people who get offended no matter what.

I want to make some of my dude with different skin tones. They would be a mixed in with the lot of my guys. Although the Catachan models would have the blunt of the Africans. The idea of a big guy in sun glasses with a heavy weapon is kind of iconic from all the Vietnam war movies.

Orks are an army that I think benefit from lots of skin tones due to the large amount of green flesh on display.

The few I've painted range from deep greens, to snot, to near yellow...

I think it comes down to Cadian Flesh or whatever they're calling it now being easy to get and use, painting various skin tones requires mixing your own paint which is not in my mind even a mid level skill. You really have to know what you're doing.

I have a Chaos Marauder unit that's a mix of different skin tones.

It can work well, but you'll need to maintain some uniform colors in order to tie them together.

Yeah, I definately agree that like-coloured armour or whatever is probably a must with figures of differing skin tones, at least in general. Otherwise you're not going to end up with a uniform army. You have any pics of those Marauders, Cryonicleech?
I guess i ought to add, the reason I posted this is that I am toying with the idea of coming back to the game with a pretty unique Inquisitorial force and decided that if I did, I wasn't going to paint them all in the "standard" tones... most likely I was thinking chinese skin for my main Inquisitor, possibly Hispanic for my Coteaz counts-as and a toal variety for the rest of my troops... IDK if I woulod want it a little more focussed though since general an army will at least be primarily of one ethnicity... thoughts?