Tim Lyson Hates Me: Painting Flesh

Welcome to Part 3 of the Painting Blog. In my humble opinion, learning to paint skin tones is a crucial step toward having a good looking army. My Skin Tone Painting was taught to me years ago from a Games Day that I had attended. This Base skin tone method was used on my imperial guard and Dwarfs, and adapted to other skin tones in my other armies. Disclaimer: I have Citadel Paints from the 90’s and on and will refer to them, but there are equivalent colours in other Paint Ranges such as P3 and Vallejo.




For Standard Humans and Dwarfs:

The first step is to paint a thin coat of Bronzed Flesh or the equivalent colour on the skin areas of the model. Next, when the base coat is dry, apply a coat of flesh wash or Gryphonne Sepia. For a rush job, this could be all you do. If want to do more detail, the next step (when the wash is dry) is to paint the cheeks, muscles, knuckles, noses and other raised areas that you want to highlight with Bronzed Flesh ( best if done with sharp detail brush). The Bronzed flesh should be thin, but not enough to flow into the recesses. The next step would be to add a little Bleached Bone using a Fine Detail Brush. This is a similar coat to the 2nd Bronze coat, but applied to the tips of the nose, knuckles, muscle, and cheeks. Try to leave the 2nd Bronze coat peeking through. On a side note, if you want to paint tattoos (Free Hand will be talked about in another edition of Tim Lyson Hates Me), I would paint them after the first Bronze coat.

For Black Primered Models, my first coat would be a thinned down coat of Snake Bite Leather or the equivalent base paint (A light thinned down brown coat would work) and then follow the instructions above.

Various other Skin tone Methods

For a paler skin such as used on my Elves and Daemonettes, replace the Bronzed flesh with Elf Flesh and the wash with the more reddish Ogryn Flesh. The highlight would be a Pale Flesh colour or add an even mix of White and Elf Flesh. I don’t recommend using this technique over Black primer unless you paint these areas white first.

For Darker skinned Models like Orcs or Bloodletters, my method is to paint a darker tone first over black

or white primer, and then using layer of lighter coats to get the desired highlighting. For my Bloodletters, I used Scorched Brown as the Base coat and then used an intermediate highlight (Mechrite Red was used) like the above 2nd Bronze coat. The final highlight was Blood Red. This was tied together with a Devlan Mud wash, and while that was wet, I washed the skin with Baal Red. (Quick method would be a Dark Base coat then Light coat over raised areas and then wash or not)

Play with these methods they have been useful tools for a great looking army. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to ask. Also if want to post a link to finish models, I’ll be glad to comment.  Thank you for reading and Happy Gaming.

-Odinfellhammer