The Secret to airbrushing flesh tones starts with a great base color!
For years I’ve struggled with the right base layer for skintones! At last I found it!
Caleb with White Metal Games here, a miniature commission servicing providing custom models for any range.
In the past I’ve used my blog for a variety of purposes; articles and tutorials, quick tips, but with so much of my social media serving double duty . . . .I’ve decided to take a new approach and treat my blog like an online journal, where I’ll chart progress on projects, share techniques I’ve stumbled upon, and share all around thoughts. You know, the things a journal is supposed to be for.
In short, tips that are too short for an article, but are still worth jotting down. This will also be helpful for me later if I want to treat my blog as an online database. Notes to self, as it were.
I’m always looking for new combinations of paint to try; basecoats and then upper layers of paint. Recently while painting some centaurs for a veteran client I was looking for a new way to apply skintones. This was a budget project, so I needed to figure out a way to save time to keep the project economical for all parties. I had a great humanoid flesh from Minitaire that I knew would make a good skin tone, but I needed a good base. I’ve tried various techniques for airbrushing skintone in the past, but this must be my favorite so far!
I was looking for a dark skin tone and stumbled across, in my paints I already owned I might add, EARTH by Minitaire. It’s basically a very light brown, but laying it down after primer (which was brown, in the case of this particular centaur), the earth paint made a great mid-tone before the final highlight.
Then I applied the miniature humanoid flesh, which is a traditional Caucasian flesh tone, and once those dried I washed it down with a skin wash. Voila! Here are a few group shots from the project.
So that’s it for today! No overall lessons to teach. Just a tip: use earth as a base for humanoid flesh, both from Minitaire.
