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 Sentineil wrote:
I found the best thing to do was not be too prescribed with it and wing it. Start with whatever dark tone you want, and then work up using glazes and blending.

I was trapped in the GW system too and I was getting frustrated because I wasn't improving. I picked up the Scale 75 range and decided to start painting marines without using any washes or citadel paints and it's really helped me break out of the rut I was stuck in.

This is really impressive, looking at the Scale 75 site it's just blending up from a base colour to the final highlights/shading? I don't have a huge amount of human skin to paint but given that they tend to be either characters or at the very least central models to the squads (Marine sergeants), I'd love to get something even half as good as your work there.

Yeah, it's just blending up. The Scale75 paints are gel based, so they're a bit different to Citadel and Vallejo. They thin very quickly and have a longer drying time, so it's easy to build up blends. And with something like skin, you can hide mistakes easily enough.

In the two weeks since my previous post, I did some experimenting with Reaper paint, specifically the Golden Skin triad. I layered the three paints of the triad, mixed a bit of brown into the Golden Shadow for deepest shading, and a bit of ivory into Golden Highlight for the strongest highlights, and finished off with two layers of Army Painter washes heavily diluted (2:1) with glaze medium to intensify the shading and smooth out the layers.



The final model:



So yeah, here's a +1 to using Reaper's paints, as the triads make it easy to paint skin without unwanted tonal variations in the layers. I was skeptical of using a wash, but the glaze medium made it a lot easier to work with. I think I'll be using this general structure for all skin in the future.

I'd take a look at these Darren Latham videos. 1st link is straight to a video, the second goes to several.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER7f-W-BHVg

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSz0WzAuhwjezFyEIv3Xksg/search?query=skin

I made a bunch of videos on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvLuFonzhD6ocXy59iVkoKd7j5hOnWWmB

I will check these vids, I made several attempts recently and it wasn’t great but I am getting better. I got some guilliman contrast coming and hope it’s a quick route to getting a good skin. But I would like to be able to do it by layering aswell for more variety

mrFickle wrote:
I will check these vids, I made several attempts recently and it wasn’t great but I am getting better. I got some guilliman contrast coming and hope it’s a quick route to getting a good skin. But I would like to be able to do it by layering aswell for more variety

The Contrast flesh tones are great, and indeed very easy to get some nice looking flesh.

What I have decided is that in 38k years when humanity is living on billions of different planets being exposed to different suns, or none at all, there are loads of different skin tones. Therefore what ever result I get is good enough because who knows what people in the future look like