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I'm painting up some night lords CSMs and have added the ammo pouch/holstered bolt pistol bits to most of them. looking at those bits, they appear to be rough-cut leather or some such, so I was thinking of painting them up in flesh tones to represent the flayed skins of their enemies. seems appropriately macabre and night lords-ish I'm stuck on what colors to use to make this work, though. I don't want it to come out too pink or it's just going to look goofy next to all that dark blue. I have the entire old citadel paint range at my disposal. any suggestions?

General flesh tone on one side, gory red on the other, then wash with a bit o purple should do it. but try a test piece

When I do flayed skin I like to start with a white base. I then do a brown wash on top. You can use the new GW sepia wash or just a watered down brown. I paint on thinned down layers of a beige flesh tone on top. You can line out the edges and details with a bone color, I think GW's new colors call it Ushtabi Bone. That will give it a more leathery look. I've never been a fan of pink flayed skin. Skin is only pink because the blood underneath it.

Flayed skin will not have red on it as dried blood turns brown/black quite quickly.
Sucks to have pale skin in such a universe as darker skin doesn't carry writing or symbols so well.
You'd think some of their enemies had lined leathery skin or do they prefer the skins of children, pale and soft? What about ork skins too?

fluff-wise, who they get their skin from could certainly run a wide range. from a modeling perspective, though, I think I want to stick with a single variation of skin tone just to make the unit look more cohesive. mixing orc skin with pale human skin and dark human skin is a little too much of the rainbow being thrown around, imo. I'll have to dig through my flesh tones and see what I have, but Tal's recipe sounds promising. Tal, I don't suppose you have photos of the end result somewhere?

Here's an example of the method I described above.

If you want to see some more you can see them on my facebook. ( I need to sit down and upload more to dakka, havent had the chance yet. )

https://www.facebook.com/HollingsworthMini

cheers Tal, thanks for that. I ended up using the old GW elf flesh as the base color (more peach than pink) and then giving it a liberal wash of devlan mud. simple, but fairly happy with the results; has more of an older, worn look to it.