Face Painting - 1/6th scale

I have a Horizon '89 Batman kit that I've started working on and I've never (in recent times) painted flesh/eyes etc at this or any scale. So I'm asking for any hits or tips or suggestions as to how best to tackle these parts. Under coat? Paint brands, and anything that might help myself and others get a good result before I go and mess it up.

I also have an airbrush if a technique requires it.

Thanks in advance.

Nice kit you got there. I painted the Billiken kit a few years ago and mixed my own skin color from various old Humbrol water based paints I had lying around from when they still sold those in Denmark.

Here's a break-down of the paints used:
Matt white (about 30 %)
Matt Flesh (about 20-25 %)
Gold (about 43-48 %)
Matt red (about 2 % - be very careful not to add too much)

I know... GOLD... what's he thinking? But it gave a pretty good naturalistic shine to the skin tone. Used semi gloss cleacoat on top of that - big mistake - so I cannot show you exactly how it looked... but it was smooth looking. It looks good with the clearcoat too, though, a bit too "sweaty"-looking when taking pictures.

Never got around to painting the lip color as the color I had mixed unfortunately dried up and I never got around to mix a new batch, as I had used up all the gold and flesh color in the last mix... so, can't help you with that.

Eyes should be painted with a fine brush. Start with the white - use off-white or mix your own color - then paint the iris and pupil matt black, then use a light blue to paint the irish - don't worry about painting over the pupil, as you can always repaint that. Then a maybe paint a little light dot at one corner of the irish... and seal it with a coat of gloss clearcoat.

Then, remember to leave an edge of skin color around the eyes, when painting the matt black make-up around the eyes, to make it look more natural.

Don't worry too much about highlights and low-lights, as that tends to look fake, anyway, unless you know what you're doing.

Check out this guy's site:

http://codyscoop.com/howto.html

His painting is awesome.

<div class='quotetop'>(BlindSquirrel @ Aug 24 2006, 09:38 PM) [snapback]1306471[/snapback]</div>

Check out this guy's site:
http://codyscoop.com/howto.html
His painting is awesome.
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Sorry, but I can't find anything that registers as a real looking skin tone. Lot of anime-style cartoonish, über stylized skin tones, yes, but nothing that looks remotely real to me.

A lot of kits are done like that, with excessive highlight and low-light and overly soft-looking colors and sheens, but it just doesn't look real - it screams: painted miniature.

Sorry to sound too harsh on the guy - his works are great and it looks good on the anime-style kits, but wouldn't work very well on kits based on real people or movie characters, imo. Though... the tutorials seem very detailed and worth a read.

Consider the use of pastel chalks over your base tones for highlights and shadows. Of course you'll have to seal with a clear cote.

Shep Paine's "Building and Painting Scale Figures" is the best starter book if you are interested. I use it frequently. The other bit of advice (not found in the book) is using Marshall's Photo Oils. They provide a transparent ink that does very well to bring out shaded areas in the face as well as clothes. It's a little known technique that I think is particularly useful.