Real flesh

**John** · 25-03-2008

I've never been a big figure painter, if I get a kit that has a figure in it I build the kit but not the figure and probably the main reason is skin colour, I always feel it looks like bad skin coloured paint and never looked that natural, I've tried several makes at the moment I really like the Vallejo paints but their flesh colour doesn't seem to do anything for me either.

whats the best way to bring it to life?

**GEEDUBBYA** · 25-03-2008

Howdy john

Well i know what you mean, I do the same thing, i build the kit but not the figures. however, I think i fail to build them for a difference reason.
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in jr and sr. high school, and even up into college, I majored in art/commercial art and advertising. I even almost went into the advertising field, but didnt.....just "blew" that education all to pieces. lol
Anyway, one thing that i hated more than anything was painting people, it didnt matter if it was on canvas, clay models or figures in plastic. And it really wasnt so much that i disliked painting people, faces can be interesting.....what i disliked was the teachers telling me 'how to paint" or what to paint. Painting is alot like modelling, its something that should be done just for the joy of doing it. And in my case, what i deemed as constant nagging by the teachers pretty much ruined painting people for me, i guess thats why i enjoy painting models so much.
But to answer your question, and my answer really wont apply to small figures, but what i learned way back then was that painting people is all about shading and blending subtle color differences. Like i said, this may not really apply to 1:35th scale figures cause you really dont have enough area to have that much detail. you will never see the pupil in a 1:35 scale figures eyes, or a single hair out of place in his moustache. Sure, you can paint a moustache on the figure, but its never really gonna look like a real moustache, It wouldnt matter if you used real hair, you just cant get that much detail in something so small. But, you can present a reasonable facsimile of a moustache, hair, skin, highlights, shading etc.
Now as for the right color, i am sure you have heard of scaling down paint havent you? the blue colors on a full scale SBD-5 Dauntless airplane are totally different from the same color applied to a 1:48th scale model. They are the exact same color, but on the model they dont look right, thats because not only did the model have to be scaled down, but the color should be scaled down too. I hope this has made some sense, i know its hard to follow my late night ramblings sometime, but i am sure most all of us here has noticed this about colors on scaled down items. One good example is the color of brass or gold, in real life both are shiny, but you wouldnt want a bright shiny brass (candle holder color) on a cleat on your 1:24 scale boat.....no, you would want to dull or "scale" down the brass color to make it look right in that scale.
Anyway, sorry i dont really have any solid answers for ya, but this was a good topic and i have often thought about these things myself.

Have a good day,

Greg

PS: This just in as I posted this response:

look at this link: Scale Effect of Paint

"It is widely accepted that paint colors should be lightened to appear more accurate. My understanding of the effect is that colors appear lighter and less distinct with distance between the object and the viewer and that, at great distance, all colors become a non-descript grey".

and heres a differing opinion:

"It depends on the color.
Cool colors tend to recede. That is one reason we paint ceilings in cool whites. It pushes them upward a bit.
Warm colors tend to come toward the viewer. If you took hinomaru red and added 30% white to it, you'd have a pink. I don't think you'd want pink disks on your factory-fresh Japanese plane model, would you? We modelers should be so lucky as to be able to mix actual size reds and other colors.
Where you add white or mists of light gray, you are actually creating more weathering than scale effect. That's why it looks good.
Consider the viewing distance. If you are standing (or flying) 400 feet away from your subject, how much water vapor, dust and other natural filter intervenes between your eye and the subject? Not a heckofalot, unless you make models of planes as seen in clouds,
volcanic smoke, the smog of L.A., etc. You should be so lucky as to be able to mix actual size colors for most of your 1/48th scale model.
From what distance do you normally view your scale model? Four feet or 40 feet? Now multiply by 72, 48 or 32. What's the distance? It's probably not 1500 yards. If you are making a 1/700-scale ship and its planes, then you had very well better lighten many of the colors to compensate for the scale distance. If you are painting a metallic finish on a car model, hoooh boy! There you need scale effect to prevent the metal flakes from
being too noticeable at scale.
One thing distance does is to blend colors together. It also eliminates detail. This is a very complex subject, and it cannot be handled with simple recipes for adjustment. "

anyway check out that link for the rest of the argument lol

PSS: In the next to last posting on that site there is something said..."I believe the best answer to this very complicated question is if it looks good to the modeler building it than it looks great." I think that sums it all up rather well.

matti_646 · 26-03-2008

Dear John, Figures are not my thing any more , but there was a time when figure painting was something i tried to get to grips with.
Firstly as Greg states, think SCALE colour.... mute all the colours and reduce the contrast. Look at examples in real life which to your eye are close in size to the figures you are wanting to paint and make a note of how much light and shade you can see, how strong the colour is. In short let your observations inform you. The quick answer that colours that you'll see are various kinds of grey coloured-yes, but grey-mostly. the next point is that you might notice that the colours are very seldom primary or secondary, they are usually tertiary "muddy" colours. To that end, and this has helped me get some surprisingly realistic flesh tones, I've used as a basis for flesh, yellow ochre ( dirty brownish yellow), and magenta (a purplish red).
Combined , these will give you a mix of the three pigment primaries red/yellow/blue to result in a tertiary base colour when white is added which looks more natural than most of the red/yellow/white blends which come over as too bright and too neutral usually.
hope my input has helped a bit.

**John** · 26-03-2008

I've mixed flesh, flat earth and light orange and it's come out quite good

Like I said I'm not a figure painter I just wanted to play and try something different, I think I will do another once Eric is finished