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I wasn't sure if I should post this in Show off or WIP, but I figured here and if you would please forgive the in progress parts in the subsequent post. Ron let me paint this lovely sculpt by Gene Van Horne. Actually, I think I might have begged to paint it and considered stealing it from his office if he refused. She'll be in the Greek Odyssey Expansion for Bones V. If by some miracle you have come to this forum and not heard of Bones V, it can be found here. Aaron Lovejoy was awesome and took some high definition photos of her after last Reapercon. I really love this sculpt, can't say that enough. She's got some fantastic detail, lots of good open space to work on blending or freehand, even a scenic base to play with stone effects. While I loved the original Yephima by Patrick Keith, and still use her in my classes, this one really screams warrior to me. I need to paint my bones version when I get it as Athena. I'll have to add a shield somewhere, though. Maybe convert the club to a spear. Decisions decisions. Anyway, feel free to ask questions. I'm happy to explain or help with anything! I'm going to post the WIP pictures I have in another post, so hopefully those will also be useful. Enjoy!

The Screaming Antelope is one of the core monsters of Kingdom Death: Monster. And the fact that you can get so many fine resources from it makes it one of the most hunted creatures in the setting. For this paintjob, I wanted to move away from both the grey standard color scheme for the antelope and away from the red "skinned antelope" look I've often seen. All together, I feel like this came out really well. The base is constructed from apoxie sculpt and green stuff.

I find this mini problematic and objectifying. that said I wanted the baboon that came with her. So I figured I’d make some progress on skin tone and paint her up. happy with how she came out even if I might not ever use her

Ok I don't do that many WIPs but I thought I'd try on this one. This is so far a base coat and 6 layers of shading. I like to use glazes so the build up is very gradual and I have to remember that everytime I start a mini lol. I will put down about 10 more layers going down all the way to a deep purple. This is at the pure tanned skin shadow phase. It will be slow going due to work but I will keep up with it. Comments and criticism welcome and before it gets mentioned I removed no mold lines this is more of a proof of concept to see if I can finish a wip post and how my skin painting is coming along. Thanks!

Whoo! I primed these all last month after ReaperCon. And then they just sat there while I finished other stuff. But now my desk is clear and I'm ready for more art! I am solidly in the "paint a solid color on the mini with a little shadow and highlight because I wanna play or sculpt" category. I also feel like I could have given my most recent sculpt a lot more love simply by not just painting her all the same shade of brown, haha! So I've gathered up my paint, a handful of bones minis, my notes from Rhonda, Derek, and Erin, and now it's time to learn how to paint skin! I'm really excited to try out different expressions, skintones, and lighting. I went ahead and primed them so if we need them for any games, they won't have blinding white clothes on. I'm not certain on all the names, but all except maybe 1 or 2 of these were from my Bones III Kickstarter order. I don't want to get pinged for nudity, so I gave this dryad a cute little Space Age dress in case she accidentally gets in the frame while I'm working on other pieces. I'm pretty pleased with it. ;)

This is painted by Chris Clayton from Modelworks. It's a Bust. If anyone has a clue how to achieve this ( with a brush) this is the Holy Grail of painting a mini. Just WOW! I will now commit seppuku by falling on my brush after I drank all of my paintwater..

I started her to demo eyes for a friend. She will be a casual and relaxed figure instead of intense nitpicking. She's still in the stage of blocking out shadows and highlights on the skin.

I painted this one in Fall/Winter for @Jay for the 2017 Secret Santa. He said he was playing a martial artist in a tabletop campaign, so I gave him "Bruce Lee". Bruce Lee has some classic yellow and black pants, so I changed the black for red for flair. To avoid ketchup-and-mustard (and the original pants color is Mustard Yellow), I popped some doodles onto the belt. I did intense shading on the skin to make it clear that the dude is made of muscles. The yellow is shaded with Arbuckles Brown from Scale 75, which is pretty much a brown-purple, through Reaper Mustard Yellow, to Scale 75 Hykey Yellow, and Reaper Linen White. I kept the base minimal for ease of use in Jay's game, and gave the base some extra sealant, anticipating handling.

(apologies for large sections of text- I like trying to explain what I'm thinking as I'm going, but I promise it will have lots of pictures!) Right, so I need to get started on a few new projects and one of the things folks expressed an interest in after reapercon was busts. I went and bought this bust: …planning to see if I could use it for a class. And when it came, I realized it was a bit larger than I expected, even with the description. Also, the mold removal didn’t seem to go very well for the sender, so I wasn’t as happy with it as I might have been. However, I got to thinking I could use it for a WIP at least, and that that might be more helpful to start with anyway. I still might do a class, but the bust called to me and I had an idea and it ate away at my resolve… so here it is. The plan is to make her into Mother Nature. Originally I’d planned to do a bunch of the sculpting first, but I felt like painting. I’ll get the face mostly done, then do the sculpting and finish painting. She’ll have a tree growing out of her shoulder, a bunch of leaves and flowers in her hair and probably some other natural and unnatural things to make the whole a more interesting story. I may attach a few animal companions as well. Right. When I decided on the theme, I knew I’d need green skin. One important thing to think about when it comes to skin is that our brains are hardwired to recognize varying shades of tan, ocher, rust, etc as skinlike. The more saturated and intense the color, the less we believe its skin. So no matter what color I want the skin to look like, I need to chose a softer more desaturated color. Green yes, but it has to be a nice quiet and pleasant green. I went to my stash of greens, took a few deep breaths and asked myself why I had so many greens, and proceeded to pick the warmest ones. I played around with a few of them on paper. I find when working with colors I haven’t before, if I make a few washes on watercolor paper, I can see how they thin, how transparent they are and how they play with each other. See how the pthalo looks cooler compared especially to the viper green? I wanted to compare and knew that one was cool. I can tolerate the peacock even though its on the cooler side comparatively, You can see here the ones I was looking at. I ended up going with these: I added the fair skin mainly because it adds more warmth to the whole. Alone, the green will end up looking too weird, but adding a touch of flesh makes a difference- I'll explain with pics in a bit. The peacock green is still fairly cool. I couldn't find a really warm dark green. But I can glaze the viper over it in places to warm it up. Next, I slathered some paint on the bust to get a sense of how the colors look. Two things. I must decide early on where my light source will be. For a bust, this is probably even more important than a smaller mini, because there’s so much surface area to work with. I have to add enough interest to keep my viewer’s eye moving. Since the bust is looking down and to the viewer’s right, I’ll make the light source come from the top left. Second thing, I need a model to help me place all of my highlights and shadows appropriately on the face. You know how the phone/digital camera has that cool “face recognition” thing these days? (…showing my age…) We people have the same thing. When we look at a face we expect to see certain familiar features. At 28 mm scale, there’s not much space to work in, but at the bust scale, if I don’t paint the highlights and shadows in a familiar fashion, it’ll look weird. What's with the Picasso? Ah hah! The face is made up of a bunch of planes and mounds and shapes that flow in to each other. When we’re babies, the division between the shapes is less defined. Our baby fat fills in all the gaps. As we age, we can start to see the skeleton behind the flesh. When painting a bust, I make a choice (often based on the sculpture itself) about how old or young I want the figure to be. In this case, I’d like mother nature to have fairly smooth features, but maybe a few lines to make her matronly. I’ll get to that. But whenever you choose to paint a bust, think about things like that ahead of time and it will make the process smoother. Cubism among many other things breaks down the human into basic geometric shapes. Learning what those shapes are will help you build up a basic volume in each area. Once you have an idea where each of the highlights go in each basic shape, the rest is all blending. But if the bulges don't match the anatomy, it will seem off. If that makes sense. This was a hard concept for me to pick up at first. Ok, I generally choose a model for my bust. In this case, I chose Scarlett Johansson. She has lovely clear skin. Now, using her, I can see in great detail with a larger blown-up pic where highlights tend to live and where shadows tend to fall. See how her cheek are sort of square or maybe triangular? The forehead and chin are circles? I grab a variety of pics from hollywood, because I can zoom in and see where all the little fiddly bits go around the eye and whatnot. Having a high resolution photo is helpful as a map to follow. here's me debating gaze direction. and playing with the eye. I've sketched in the basic parts. I did some blending and smoothing. I put this one in to show the way the bust sits on the table. So the direction of gaze makes a bit more sense in context. It's hard to make eyes look directly ahead and make them match up, especially with this sculpt because one eye is sculpted larger than the other. It's a lot easier to have an off center gaze. I promise to come back to the eyes, but when I first start, I bounce around and let things dry while working on other areas. So it progresses more quickly. I did some smoothing on the skin and cleaned up the eyes, chose where I wanted a few more highlights on the cheeks. Worked on the lips. See how the top lip is dark and the bottom lighter? That has to do with the anatomy of the face. the bottom one bulges out and the top slants back and doesn't catch the light. Also, just to give you a sense of scale, here's another bust and sir forescale: She's ginormous. So, it stands to reason I have to put more detail into her features and work harder on the blending to make it smooth. That is one of the tricks with larger minis. You have to blend the heck out of it or it won't look like skin. Ok, it did more work on the eyes. I should explain eyes at this point... My trust internet model! Take a look at the eye and see where all of the highlights a shadows fall. This is based on the anatomy underneath. The eye is a big oblong ball-like shape. The lids cover this, which means they bulge out towards us. Generally, that means they catch light at their outermost part, and are shaded below. Take a look at the corner on the left of the eye. That’s the tear duct. Adding that to a bust really adds a sense of realism to the painting. Adding the lashes and the iris lines will tuck in little details to make it more like a real eye. The sclera (white) of the eye is actually a more blueish in color, though in someone with liver issues it can look yellowish. I save pure white for the reflection so it’s the brightest spot and can still be differentiated from the scelera. Pure white in the sclera means we won’t get the full impact of the highlight and also pure white is colder. see the palette here: the two whites near the middle are linen and pure I’m using linen because it has a hint of yellow in it and I want the skin to live on the warmer side. Also, see how the highlight on the eye isn’t directly over the pupil, but more over the iris? The eyes is constantly wet with our tear ducts, so it should always look shiny- that highlight spot helps sell the wet effect, just like light on a wet road or a metal sword edge ok- must work. more soon! I'll probably edit this post and add a bunch more explanation and details, I just want to post in case the computer tries to eat it!

I painted Xanthia from Hasslefree and am super happy with how she came out. I wanted to go with a dark skin tone. I used Reaper clears as glazes. I used Clear Purple to glaze in the shadows, clear red over the midtones and clear yellow on the highlights. It added a lot of depth and realism to her skin (I think so anyway). I wish I could post photos here but she is definitely not safe for work So if you click the links, be aware she is topless and only wearing a loin cloth for bottom coverage (which does little to cover her bottom). She might be the best mini I have painted so far. Definitely the best skin! NSFW photos in the links! Proceed with caution! Xanthia - Front View Xanthia - Back View There are also more photos of her on my Wee World Miniatures page (link below). C&C welcome. Thanks for looking!

Was attempting tattoos and didn't like the mess I made. I started over by dunking in simple green (regretting that decision). Attempt #2! I should document my progress, this should help push me. Using grey primer because I can't find my white primer. 09299: MSP Core Colors: Grey Primer

I do have a princess mousling to alleviate the death and dead stuff painting I've been doing. But I couldn't resist putting a face on this one. Any resemblance to FLOTUS is entirely coincidental, seriously. I think the shading/highlighting toned it down, but the figure does have the angular structure on the face. To conceal the mold lines I failed to remove on her exposed leg and arm I'm going to freehand some tattoos. I really should do better on removing mold lines. Oh well.

A friend asked me to paint this and the Grand Mystic to match. I really liked this Dwarf a lot. Part of me wants to keep him.

I bought the Mother of Dragons bust at Reapercon last year initially with the idea of painting it up for my dad (who is supportive of my painting but ambivalent towards painted miniatures in general) as a present since he loves Game of Thrones. But, I just couldn't get in to painting it as Daenerys. It didn't click. So, dad will have to wait for me to find something equally cool. Although I did buy him some of those charity water-dot-org chalices which I'm thinking he'll like better anyway... plus charity! And beer! Right, at any rate, I've realized something about my painting. I'm not satisfied with my skill set. I always want to add to it or work on something new or learn different technique. Otherwise I feel bored and I can't get motivated to paint. So, in my never-ending quest to expand my mind and go all Neo on this bust, I'm tackling darker skin. It's something I am not good at... yet! But, I also wanted to play with the platinum blonde Daenerys hair since it's also new to me. Blonde is not intuitive and I have to think when I paint it. ...and we all know what dark skin plus white hair means... So, I went in search of inspiration. Khoudia Diop is just gorgeous. I loooooove her skin. Hints of purple and red... beautiful! Now this pic I like for the frontal lighting reference but her skin looks much browner. You can still see the purple, but it's more muted. So I'll go with the lighting on the second and the color from the first. I picked my colors and am documenting them so in three months when I get around to working on this again I won't forget! I couldn't find my ghost white when I started painting so I settled on spectral white. And I'm glad I did. It kept with the theme of the purple. I did find the ghost white later, never fear. So, when I paint skin on a bust, I have a huge surface area to work with. Which means I can add a whole lotta depth of color. I can glaze different shades in to my heart's content. I think this is some of what makes skin look more realistic. I've said it before but it never hurts to reiterate- skin is all about layering. Underneath skin lie bones, tendons, muscles, fat, vessels, nerves finally covered by layers upon layers of translucent cells. Which means there's a huge variety of colors in skin itself, not to mention any shadows or light cast upon it. I like using the photo reference because it makes me really look and see where the colors are and where to put all my highlights and shadows. When I basecoat my skin I wet blend. Basically, I take my paint, mix it to about what shade I want and apply, adding a few areas of dark and light to get a sense of the form and the volume. Since I couldn't pick one color to match Khoudia's skin I mixed a bit of the mahogany with the dark elf skin and the nightshade purple. I used a big brush. I have a #6 series 36 (the cheaper ones) Davinci just for big projects like this. Once I got the base down I switched back to my #1. Oh, and I forgot- I sanded the resin bust USING MY N-95 PROTECTIVE MASK, glued the head and the support on (waiting on the hair, etc until I get father) and washed the while thing with dish soap. I filled in a few areas with greenstuff and primed it with reaper brush on primer. Here's me working on figuring out where the highlights go. Faces have planes that form geometric shapes like circles and triangles. Get these highlighted early and it really guides painting later on. I added a bit of the oiled leather in with the spectral white to keep it on the warm side. notice how I may blend a bit, but I'm focusing more on shape. I can always blend later. Besides, the more layers I use, the more realistic the skin looks. And I might earn my 1K Layering Achievement Badge. If only that existed... Not sure I like the eyes. Not sure what color eyes I want but they were just staring at me. I wanted something different that would stand out. Meh. I'll think about it. I used brilliant blue with the spectral white for reference. h ugh, focus off on that one. I glazed in a bunch of the mahogany brown to de-purple-ize the skin. It was getting a bit purple. I also want to have the left side of the photo (right side of the face) be darker since the head is tilted to the side. So I used more brown and less highlight on that side. I put a hint on pink in the lower lip as well as the tear ducts in keeping with anatomy and all that. In typical Corporea fashion I took a break from skin and played with the hair. I had a hard time figuring out the colors for it. I almost used the ghost white, but settled on a warmth using the oiled leather and some linen white with the dark elf skin as a shadow. The three mixed together make this lovely gray. So, that's where I am right now. Hmmn... maybe about 4 hours of work I think, With a few Skyrim breaks here and there. She still needs more red and brown. Waaaay too purple. But that's for next time! Hooray!!!

EDITED: I tried to fix the pics since the originals were on photobucket. Apologies if they're a bit off! Ok, face painters! Have you always wondered how to get nice smooth skin blend? I'm going to do my best to take you step by step through a face. I could probably be persuaded to also move on to other skin areas, but let's start simple. Now, while snapping photos I realized this blending is not going to be as neat and clean as I usually like it because the photoing process did interfere with a few layers. But, we'll get it smooth in the end! Are you ready?! First things first: A large model, to better illustrate what we're doing! And our materials. We have Yephima, cloud giantess, a W&N #2, and RMS paint! I used fair skin as my flesh color, and I'm going to shade with porcelain rose and spattered crimson and highlight with pure white. This should give us a nice warm flesh tone. I'll also use walnut brown on the eyes. After snapping this, I also realized I wanted blue eyes- so I added ashen blue for the iris. Porcelain is a retired color. You can sub punk rock pink or just mix spattered with white and it'll work just fine. But I had it, and I like it, and if I keep using it, maybe reaper will bring it back! 1. Step 1: basecoat the face with fair skin. Hey! My model has a little face blemish! Oh no! What can I do to fix this? Never fear, face painters! Just take a little bit of brush-on sealer and cover the blemish with a nice layer, and it will smooth out. You can then put another layer of basecoat on top. I did a total of 3 layers of flesh, mainly because I forgot to wash this model and I had some adherence issues on the chest. 2. Step 2: The eyes! Line with walnut. Doesn't have to be perfect. You can always touch up with flesh. Paint the sclera white. Pure white probably isn't as good as linen or leather white, but I'm trying to limit our palette. Add the iris- ashen blue, as you can see. Here's where we pick the direction of gaze and try to make the eye "look" in the same direction. Takes some practice to figure our what works and what you like. Again, if paint goes where you don't want it, just touch up. Hmmn... I could have sworn I took one with just the blue... at any rater, after the blue is down add the walnut brown pupil. Then dot the pupil with white. Sorry, that back eye is hard to see. Usually there's an easy eye and a hard eye. Some people start with the hard eye. I start with the easy eye, so at least one will look the way I want! 3. Step 3: Breathe. Don't forget to breath again now that the eyes are done! 4. Step 4: Shading. This is a lot messier because I'm pausing to photo- sorry! First I lay down a thin glaze of spattered crimson all the way to the edge of the walnut, then clean the brush and just smooth the edge out using a damp brush and some feathering type strokes. Thin is better. See how nice and translucent this layer is? You can easily see the flesh underneath. I went back in with a thin glaze of my flesh to reclaim some of that cheekbone from the shadow. Then proceeded to put some crimson on the side of the nose and smooth it out. I really tried to catch each specific step. But- you can see how thin the layer is, then how it smooths with a damp brush. I usually do a few layers of this and reclaim my flesh with a thin glaze if I feel I have too much shadow tone. The crimson will mesh nicely with the walnut so that it looks like she has nice intense Maybelline lashes! Er- probably don't want quite this much contrast with a male face. If I were doing this on a male model, I'd pick something like ruddy brown to line the eyes. More soon!

(reaper bones #77207) This is the second time I've done human flesh, and the first time I think I was remotely successful with it... I hope. Keep in mind that at this point the rest of the figure hasn't been touched (it's a serious work in progress), but before I continued, I wanted some advice from the community... Does the flesh look okay? Is there anything I could or should do to improve it?

Hello, Question from a beginning painter, How do I paint skin? I started with the fair skin triad, and used this method 1) Prime white 2) Basecoat with fair skin 3) wash/shade with fair skin shadow 4) highlight with fair skin highlights But so far im having poor results. Can anyone share their secrets?

Okay, I have a couple of different washes (well, one's a wash, and another's an ink). I have an old Pro Paint stock no. 19106 Flesh Ink. I also have an MSP9253 Flesh Wash. What's the best way to utilize each?

So I am painting my first 54mm I am using the "vampire skin" triad with maggot white as a hightlight and nightmare black as a shadow. I feel like there should be another colors in the shadows but I don't know what. This is just a quick sketch of what color is going where and I am not 100% on the color yet. I also lost a bunch of the shadows that should be on the lowet legs so they need to be added in. The base will be brown with aged yellowish skulls.

I found a tutorial for mud bases. I thinking about make a grass bases for my blood bowl nun team, but the grass is broken with muddy areas. But if the nuns are playing on such a dirty place, they should look more muddy. Does anyone have a tutorial to create clothes and skin with mud on it. Or has example interesting example pictures with a short explanation?

I have just recently picked up the hobby of painting Miniatures and have been having allot of fun with it but I feel I may be lacking some techniques. I have done the Learn to Paint Kit 1 and enjoyed / learned allot but have been unable to find a copy of Learn to paint Kit 2. I called reaper and they said they are currently not making the Learn to Paint Kit 2 and plan on replacing it with a Bones version at some point in the furture but did not give a time frame. I bought Learn to paint kit 3 and after reading some on the forums I discovered that maybe I should have saved 3 for last as people are suggesting doing the kits in 1, 2, 4, 5, 3 order. Do you think Reaper would be willing to just sell a copy of the instruction sheet?

I was going to enter this one as well into the fall/halloween contest, but I am not really happy. I like the colours, I like the mini, I just could not get things to smooth out and go where I wanted them to. still, here she is.

77004: Cave Troll Citadel: knarloc green, camo green, cathlan brown, thraka green, devlan mud MSP: ruddy leather, oiled leather, linen white, sun yellow P3: jack bone Please excuse the poor photography. This was painted for skin practice, it's my first attempt at trying more advanced techniques. I had a lot of fun with this one, and I think I'll be painting another in the near future. Thanks for viewing!