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Hi guys,

I'm looking for some advise about painting faces. I got a box of Zerkers and i want the champ to not have a helmet. I've always put helmets on my champs to specifically avoid painting the face, and it's about time i man up and paint it

Thanks.

I'm fairly addicted to using nuln oil and earthshade to paint everything. If you are not comfortable with the ink washes I don't recommend this:

Paint the entire flesh area with white. hold the model upside down so that the head is point straight down at the table, apply a very thin layer of nuln oil to the entire flesh area (this will run into the areas where shadows should form if there is light above. Avoid putting wash on raised areas (forehead, bridge of the nose, cheeks, chin) set the model right ways up before its completely dry to even the layer of wash out. let it dry out completely. now do a wash of the earthshade with the model sitting normally, cover all the flesh areas, this coat should be pretty thin. try to have the raised areas get only a bit of the brown tint. let dry, apply more coats of the earth shade until you are happy with how dark the skin is. Remember if you are quick you can quickly wipe your brush and use it to actually wick extra ink wash out of the model. enjoy and good luck

Faces are all about tone;

Start with a basic flesh tone, give it a reddish brown wash.
This should look like a heavy reddish tanned skin.

Next do the eyes. Don't use pure white or pure black, and don't worry if you go over the skin a bit at this point. If at a loss what to do, add a little of the base skin tone to the white and black just to knock them down a bit. Once the white and pupil are done, if you're feeling up to it, you can white dot a highlight in - overlap the pupil slightly.

Now go back with the base skin tone (tallarn flesh etc) and highlight the majority of the face, including the eyelids, which probably have some mess on them at this point. It's here you need to be careful, but its easier because you have the large flesh area to work from.

Continue highlighting by adding a bone/ light tan sort of colour (I like VMA sand, as it's quite liquid and makes layering with the mixes easier). Go all the way up to pure bleached bone / sand at very extremes.

Now for tone; red and blue/grey glazes; I use thinned blood red and shadow grey. Apply the blues around the eyes and jaw, and the red over the nose and cheeks. BE VERY SUBTLE and build it up slowly. Extremely thin pain, very very little on your brush.

Should take about 15 minutes to do a whole face. Pretty quick, and very effective.

@Molotovsoda. That's an interesting way to do it.

Your white layer, is it a solid cover? Having painted White Scars for a while i know how much of a pain is the it is to get a solid cover.

@Winterdyne. Hmm. Not so sure about the red and blue/grey glazes. Going to look in your gallery at some of your pics (if you have any )

I have a somewhat-quick but effective way I like to use:

Paint the face the same colour as the rest of the skin (in my case, Tallarn Flesh for a basecoat), then wash with Ogryn Flesh. Layer with Dwarf Flesh, leaving the darker shade in the recesses.

Then, focussing on the T-Zone: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SudMXducyFo/T_7s6E92nZI/AAAAAAAAC7Q/5KlboFIDT0M/s1600/tzone.jpg (yes, we're getting into makeup terminology... but then, what else do you call painting faces? ), highlight with elf flesh.

For the eyes, I just paint a base of Skull White, then add the pupils in Chaos Black. Note: One side of the pupils should touch the edge of the eye... top sides, whatever, it doesn't matter as long as you don't leave a dot isolated in the middle of the eye, otherwise the mini will look startled, as though they've just been goosed.

For my guard, I also give a wash of red on their noses- peoples nose tends to be a different colour to the rest of their face, but it's very much a matter of taste. ;p

A (slightly) blurry example:

Check the IG in my titan thread. Pretty much all the faces I do use the same principles. Sometimes if I want a cold look I'll use a light blue/grey rather than bone (something like Spacewolf grey).

Thanks for all the advise. I got 2 or 3 heads lying around here somewhere, i'll try each method and see which is 'best'