Welcome back to this two-part series on painting faces; you can see the first part here! In this article, we will be painting a face from start to finish in a step by step guide! This is by no means an exhaustive tutorial, a particular skin mixture, or the best results I have ever gotten with a face (I am by no means an expert and I still have a lot to learn myself!) My goal here is to give you a framework to push your ability to paint faces on your miniatures, and maybe even enjoy the process more! Some of these tips are also very applicable to other aspects of your painting so hopefully even if you don’t want to paint faces, you’ll still learn something from this article!
This is the palette of paint I’ll be using, but feel free to use any brand or equivalent colors you like. I like the Pro Acryl paints by Monument Hobbies, but any paint brand you have is fine; they are by no means e requirement.
Before we get started, a brief aside on paint consistency. You have probably heard “two thin coats” or “thin your paints,” but this can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, especially between people using different paint ranges. Paint consistency is something hard to demonstrate with just words, but I’ll give it a go so that we have a frame of reference for the rest of the article.
The first consistency I made use of is a base coat. This is not anything overly complicated, it’s a thicker mix of paint that is just applied to the model from the mixture on my wet palette without anything added more than just the slightly damp brush I use as standard. A base coat was really only used for part III below.
The second is a layer. This is a bit trickier and more nuanced. A layer is paint thinned with water (and personally I like to add a touch of flow improver) to a consistency that flows easily from the brush. This is just one of those things you’ll need to find what works best for you. I’ve heard people say that you need to aim for the consistency of milk, or melted ice cream, or soup (whatever the hell THAT means…), but I think it’s different for everyone. Your preferred amount of water in your wet palette, the brand of paint you’re using, the amount of humidity in your air, all of these things play a role in differentiating people’s experiences and recommendations. My suggestion is to use your thumbnail or back of your thumb as a test paper for your paint consistency, as I have done below. This is about what I look for in a layer, and this is what I use when painting any of the steps below that I don’t specify the consistency of.
Credit: Meltabombed
Credit: Meltabombed
Third is a glaze. A glaze is thinned even more than a layer and is used more for filtering, blending, and smoothing. You are not looking for a solid, opaque layer; glazing is a precision tool. An important note on glazes is when you get it to the consistency you want it (again, testing on your thumbnail), you want to wick the excess off your brush onto a paper towel. You want thin paint, and not a lot of it. If you leave all the moisture in your brush, that is more like a wash that will flood into the recesses of your model, and that’s not what we want here. Aim for your brush to look like mine; the bristles should still come to a point, not be all splayed and swollen with moisture.
Credit: Meltabombed
Lastly is the aforementioned wash. We all know what a wash is, we’ve all used them. Thin paint, allowed to flood the model and go into the recesses. I really only used one wash in this process and it was very targeted.
Now that we have a framework and without any further ado, let’s get into it.
Prime
We will be painting a head from the new(ish) Horus Heresy Melee Weapons Upgrade box. I have primed it black. In the first article, I talked about doing a zenithal highlight or pre-shade as a light map (or as a base coat for easy wash or Contrast type paint application.) I encourage you to still try it out, but for this face I skipped that step as I did not feel I needed it. Plus, working with thicker layers of paint like I will be makes it unnecessary pretty quickly.
I primed this head through an airbrush using Pro Acryl Black primer. Prime as you see fit, but remember my warnings about tearing paint from the last article, so I recommend an airbrush or rattle can primer rather than a brush-on primer
Choose Lighting
When trying to up your face painting game, you need to decide where the light will be coming from for your figure so that we can paint a believable miniature portrait. With a zenith highlight or pre-shade, this part will be taken care of. But you can also totally do it without one like I did here. With a general gaming figure, this doesn’t really matter, but if you are wanting to push your painting to the next level, it’s good to keep in mind. You want to have an idea of where the main source of light for your figure is coming from and then try to keep that consistent over the entire model. Painting a disembodied head in the dreaded sub-assembly will make this exercise a bit more difficult, but keeping the head off your figure (if you can) does make it easier to physically paint.
For this face, I chose a light source coming from camera front and left so that the light will be strongest on the right (camera left) side of his face, pictured below.
It is also important to pick the temperature or color of your light source as well. Essentially, what color is your main source of light? This is sometimes referred to as a universal highlight color, or “mother color.” This is a single tone or paint that you will use to highlight every area of your model to both unify the color scheme and to make the model feel more like it is in the environment you envision. Common colors are things like Ice/Pale Yellow for a harsh, bright, sunny light, Sunny Skintone (pale orange) for a slightly softer sunny day/afternoon sun, or Pale Blue for either “cold” sun or moonlight. For this head, I’ve chosen to go for a pale orange color with the Dark Warm Flesh and Warm Flesh paints, both because they are good warm Caucasian skin tone colors but also because I find pale orange to be a good universal highlight color for Space Marines in general (my Blood Angels have orange all over them.)
Base-coat and Eyes
As discussed in the last article, some people can find it helpful to start with painting the eyes. I went ahead and base-coated the face using a mix of the Dark Magenta and Coal Black for this dark purple color.
I then took a little of the Coal Black, thinned way down with some water to a wash consistency, and painted it onto the eye sockets, just to help me find the eyes and let me see the details a bit clearer.
I used some of the lightest tone I planned to use, Olive Flesh, to paint in the eyeballs. As I said before, I could do a whole article on just eyes (and might), but one thing people often get “wrong” with eyes is painting the ‘whites’ of the eyes pure white. Without getting too into the weeds with this, very little pure white really exists in nature. Look at your white walls or your white t-shirt; if you were to take a picture and use the paint sampler tool, it would probably not be pure white. Thus, when you paint the ‘whites’ of the eyes white, it looks unnatural and we as human-type creatures don’t like it on a subliminal level. The yellowish-orange off-white of the olive flesh is a decent pick, but it was mostly because it was in my chosen palette anyway. Thin your paint a little, wick some off on a paper towel, and using the side of your brush paint in the eyeballs. This is easier said than done, and I can’t really give you any pointers for this besides just practice, know you will probably have to try it multiple times, and just keep doing it until you like the results. That’s also why we’re doing this early. If you mess up, it’s only the basecoat you have to fix and not half the face. It varies from face to face (depending on anatomy, facial expression, etc.) but shoot for an almond shaped eyeball. Try your best to maintain a dark rim around the eye to maintain contrast (not necessarily black) and don’t be afraid to touch up afterward. You can see I got a little out of hand on the camera left eye.
Then, using whatever dark color you like (black is fine for this), dot the eyes. Try you best to make them point in the same direction. If you want a neutral, “looking forward” face, try to have the pupil touching both eyelids. I wouldn’t stress too much about the shape of the iris and pupil on a 28mm model, just do your best to make them even and looking the same direction. Not much more to it than that, with the same caveat that you might need to try a couple times to get it right. Them’s the brakes, not really much to say there.
Building Up the Mid-Tones
Next, in an attempt to bring more warmth to this very dark and cold base-coat, I mixed some more Dark Magenta into the base tone and begin applying it everywhere but the deepest recesses. In retrospect I think I would have just started with this tone; Dark Magenta mixed with a tiny touch of black. I would have also painted further into the recesses on the cheeks with this color if I was to do this over.
Next, I mixed some Red Beige into the Dark Magenta mixture. It looks pretty rough at the moment, but don’t worry we’ll get there. I applied this to most of the surfaces of the face. I wasn’t really thinking about our light source for the time being, but I painted mostly upwards facing surfaces.
Then I put some Dark Warm Flesh (basically Sunny Skintone in many other ranges) into the mixture and focused even more on the upwards facing surfaces, but now began to tend towards the camera left side where our light source is coming from.
I then repeated this step with more or less pure Dark Warm Flesh, beginning to focus even more to the camera left side.
Highlights
I then mixed Olive Flesh into the Dark Warm Flesh to touch the highlights and focused on the highest points of the face from the camera left; the forehead/brow, the bridge of the nose, the tip of the nose and nostril, the cheek, and the top of the chin. I know, I skipped a paint, we’ll come back.
I then took the Warm Flesh (see, told ya) and glazed it over the highlights to bring it back into the orange realm; see earlier comment on layer vs. glaze consistency. Remember that we chose a pale orange universal highlight color? While I want the contrast of a “pure white” (or off-white as I discussed before) highlight, I still want it to stay in the orange zone and thus the glaze.
Details and Refinement
At this point in painting a face, it becomes a lot of back and forth that is hard to photograph in a step by step manner and is even harder to describe. This is not a “paint the rest of the owl” situation, I promise. At this point, I just went back and further between previous mixtures blending along edges, smoothing out shapes, deepening shadows or pushing highlights, always keeping in mind the main light source. Needless to say, this is where the practice comes in and what separates the students from the masters; I am certainly the former. Just take your time, take the face to the point of refinement you’re happy with, and call it a day.
I repainted the bottom lip with a mixture of the more magenta-y base tone mixed with one of the mid tones for a pale burgundy/reddy color. It may have still been a bit too dark though; I think I needed a bit more magenta and mid tone in the mix. My advice is to look at reference photos of faces to see how the lip color contrasts with the surrounding skin tones. I generally only paint the bottom lip of my gaming figures, as it takes a bit of extra work to get both lips to look right together, and even then I generally save that for female models.
At about the same time I also took some thin Dark Magenta and glazed it over the scar on his forehead. I then picked out with one of the paler mid tones (I think the Red Beige/Dark Warm Flesh mixture) to look like a healed, but not quite old, scar.
I also blacked in the hairline, ear pieces, and service studs to pick out with some quick metallics for the final step.
I then continued to refine and tweak and adjust until I got to this, the final result. It doesn’t look a whole lot different and it was maybe 10-25 minutes of futzing.
Final Thoughts
This is definitely not the best face I’ve ever painted; you likely saw some better examples in my last article. But that is exactly the point; not every face can be, or will be, perfect. Hopefully, by giving you all a step by step to try to follow (and fail at; I wouldn’t say I successfully followed my own tutorial here), I may have helped you lose the fear and try to improve your painting of faces. Maybe you even picked up a tip for other aspects of your painting! For example and to give myself some feedback, the paint still feels pretty rough in some places here. The shadows under the cheeks are a bit too deep and make our guy feel sallow and gaunt, which isn’t exactly what I was going for (but maybe that’s a look that you want!) The shadows in some of the wrinkles are a bit too deep and make him look kind of wrinkly. The lip is a bit too dark.
Painting tiny faces is hard, and it takes practice. You may be someone who just wants to make your guardsmen to not look like coke fiends, or you may be someone who wants to push into competition painting. Either way and anywhere along that spectrum, you start from somewhere and to improve you practice practice practice. There is no way for me to teach you the literal technical application of paint onto model; only your own brain can do that to your own hands. Take 5 faces, put them on toothpicks, and go nuts. Each time put the time and effort into trying to do better than the last time, and focus on one or two aspects of the face that I’ve talked about. For one, focus on the color and creating a pleasing skin tone of whatever shade you want. On the next, focus on a credible light source, etc. Over time, dedicated, purposeful practice will yield results, I promise.
Case in point and as a bit of a teaser, just since painting this face and writing this article, here is a picture of the face I have painted for my upcoming Capital Palette entry for NOVA 2025; much better if I do say so myself. In fairness, I did spend about 5 times as long on it…
If you have suggestions or requests for other articles you would like to see from me, please drop them below in a comment or tag me in the discord; I am happy to consider them! For my next article, I will be adding my own take on painting a true-metallic blade to the existing HTPE article, and have started working on a walkthrough on how I paint my Heresy Blood Angels scheme that I’m asked for all the time.
If you ever want feedback on something you are painting, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram or in the Goonhammer discord server @meltabombed; I’d be happy to take a look at what you’re working on! If this article helped you, please let me know; I would love to hear from you!
Thank you for reading, and see you all next time!
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