Hi,

Any generic advice about painting human faces in IA? I am used to true 25mm and 15mm and I barely muddle my way through 28mm. So this 30mm stuff is really a tough scale for me to paint in. My faces wind up smudged, blurry, etc. They look fine at tabletop distance but when you pick them up and inspect them... not so much. I can't even attempt eyes on these people. The details barely catch the shading inks. Help please. Faces are a real challenge at this gigantic scale.

I stuck with a "no eyes" policy.

I had way too many derp faces back in my warhammer days, to I decided going in with IA, to not do the eyes, just a nice flesh wash and decent hair, and details/scars where needed (with a fine enough brush when needed). I had a go with Luke and Gideon eyes early on and decided... no (those two more or less ended up finished with pupiless zombie eyes haha)

I'll do the eyes of alien species (which are often larger), and special characters, but for the many humans, I just felt I would be way less stressed trying to perfect the eyes!

They look great on the table and fine when picked up, they still have character to them, and I got them done a lot more quickly without having to OCD fuss over any more derp googles

yeah I don't bother with eyes.

I usually do a dark base color, and then do gradual highlights focusing the most on the nose and cheekbones. and leave the lips unhilighted. that tends to give me results I'm happy with.

If you do want to try for eyes, and you don't have the precision skills that some of the amazing painters on this forum have, I find it's way easier if you paint them first.

So paint the whole face in a darker flesh-tone, then do a wash, then once it dries paint the eye whites and pupils before continuing. Invariably my eyes end up huge and derpy-looking at this stage, but since I haven't done the highlights yet I can use the original dark flesh-tone to shrink the eyes back down to a more human-looking scale. I find it 10x easier to paint sloppy eyes and then shrink them to a neat size compared to trying to straight up paint tiny eyes like Sorastro and co. do. Better still, if you screw up at this stage it's easy to just start again without worrying about messing up all the highlighting that you've done.

Once you've got that done you can start highlighting with a lighter flesh tone (or a mix between dark tone/light tone, then the light tone afterwards). I also tend not to go too over-bright with the highlighting compared to what Sorastro does - when he does it it looks great, when I do it it tends to look more like they're wearing badly caked-on makeup.

3 hours ago, ManateeX said:

I find it 10x easier to paint sloppy eyes and then shrink them to a neat size compared to trying to straight up paint tiny eyes like Sorastro and co. do.

That's a great idea, I'll try that. My first figures also have no eyes, not a big deal. I was just brave enough to try eyes recently, I was really impressed at what I did, although one of the pupils could've been a bit more centered. Make sure you're ready and steady, your own eyes focused and relaxed. Paint can't be watered down much here. Have an absorbent paper towel ready for redos, and let each eye stage dry.