It's my first time painting, and I'm painting Veers, but can't manage to paint any semblance of eyes without ruining the rest of the face. Sorastro doesn't go into it, and I'm stumped. How do you do it? Here is my Veers so far:
I know it has a lot of flaws, and you're more than welcome to give pointers, but it's specifically the eyes I can't figure out.
Q: “How do you paint faces”
A: “I paint them pretty badly.”
In all seriosness this is something lots of people find challenging. For the most part I just paint the face and apply a shader and then hope no one looks too close. I have not tried to do eyes but I might in the future.
@Sorastro does offer some good tips on this, just not in every single video. The general consensus seems to be to paint the eyes forst, then when your white dot is invariably too big and outside of the eye socket you can paint flesh tone around the edges to bring it back to normal. I have seen some people suggest using a fine tip marker for the pupils but most just use a small brush and pray for a steady hand.
I haven’t tried it because I have a feeling eyes that go wrong will bug me more than just skipping them all together. But I’m starting to experiment a bit with more things in my painting so I may get around to it.
I paint a lot of 1:12 scale, 1:18 and 1:35 faces and the best way I find to paint faces at 1:48 scale which Legion is roughly around is the old simple dry brush and wash method.
1. Paint the skin with a light brown for an undercoat as this will tone the skin colour down as well.
2. Paint over the light brown undercoat skin tone that is a little darker the normal skin tone, I use AK interactive AK 3012(LIGHT FLESH) but trust me this is darker then is sounds.
3. I then dry brush a light skin tone over the face as this will highlight the raised area's of the face.
4. I then use a shadow flesh as a wash over then face and let dry for half an hour.
5. Last thing I do is give the face a light wash of the shadow flesh but add a very tiny amount of brown to darken it a little.
6. Once you have done the steps you can go over the faces by painting hair, eyebrows, eyes etc.
I have attached a few pics of my 1:48 scale figures to show you what the end result looks like and don't get me wrong I'm not a great face painter at this scale but the result looks ok.
I tend to paint the eyes first as I usually start from a dark brown base on the flesh , I paint the white of the eyes as a short stripe then dot them with a dark colour, usually black or a dark brown, then paint the rest of the face as usuall. You could paint the eyes last but it will mean you will have to clean up your flesh if you make any mistakes, doing them first means that any mistakes made are easier to correct. But honestly it's just a case of brush control, make sure your paint is diluted properly, and you have a good point on your brush and the rest is just practice.
For an advance technique you could even paint the iris and pupil seperatly, a blue/green/brown dot for the iris, folowed by a small dot of black for the pupil and if you want to get super fancyn an even tinier spot of white in a corner for reflection, sounds crazy but I've done it on 28mm warhammer models so it should be doable on Legion models too
Thank you for the tips, I'll give it a go after work. I can always fix it, after all.
It sounds like the easiest way to do the faces at this scale is the just not do eyes, but shade it instead. This gives me hope that I can actually handle it.
50 minutes ago, Qwrety77 said:It sounds like the easiest way to do the faces at this scale is the just not do eyes, but shade it instead. This gives me hope that I can actually handle it.
This is usually how I approach it. Look at a real person from far enough away that they appear as tall as a gaming mini at arms length, and guess what? You can't even see a person's eyes that far away. Just shadows looks a lot more realistic than overdone cartoon eyes.
Now, don't get me wrong, I've seen some beautifully painted eyes on this scale of model but I think that (unless you're objective is to be a highly skilled miniature artist) the end result is not worth the effort to get it right.
Shadows for the win!
I never paint the eyes as I know I am not good at it, and it may ruin my whole paintjob. As said above, I also shade the eyes instead of painting them, and the result is perfectly tabletop like this.
No eyes are better than bad eyes. I prime in white. Give the skin a light base colour. Then do a big white Adam Ant line over the eyes and nose. Slightly off white is better. Carefully dot the pupils. (Close one of your own eyes doing this; it helps). Use a grey or dark blue/brown rather than black. Then shade in all around with the skin colour to re-form the eye shape. Doesnt matter much if the skin tone seeps in to the eye socket if its watered down. This method works for me, looks good at arms length and avoids Snuffleupagus eyes.
Edited by Alan Noir