Painting skin tones is a technique I struggled with for a long while and something I will continue to refine with each piece.
This post will show how I painted my “Grimferatu” piece which was a commissioned piece.
I use Liquitex soft body acrylics (all colors listed in “”)
I use “unbleached titanium” as the base of my skintone with a few other colors added to it depending on the piece I am working on. I measure no paint. Only by eye. One thing to remember. I have no idea what I am doing, the statements below and my process is potentially completely flawed. I always mix up a batch of my base skin tone to mix all my base colors from.
As such all my skin tones come from this, skin2 skin3 etc…
Make sure and let each coat dry completely or they will bleed into each other ruining the paintjob (I am an impatient idiot)
For my skin painting on Grimferatu, I did the following
A base coat of gray. I chose gray because of the blue under tones I wanted on the face.
A noodled coat of a very pale skin tone. I will call this skin1
A noodled coat of Skin1 with a bit of ” deep portrait pink” in it, skin2. near the eyes, nose and ears.
A fine mist of skin1 was done to the entire piece at this point.
What this does is ties in all the mottling that I have done. It may look like it is one solid body of color but it is not. The camera and lighting blends a lot of this together as well as the Jpeg compression
Now I have a base skin to work on.
I mixed up “twilight” and painted some hazy bodies of color on the top of the head, and repainted the “deep portrait pink” around the eyes, ears etc… Added veining on chin and top of head. I paint the inside of the nostrils and ears a dark color, and then misted him lightly with skin1 again.
At this point I had my base skin with veins done. But I wanted him Bluish in color. So I had a color called “baltic blue” which I added to skin1 this would be skin3 and skin4 is mixed with “twilight”. Skin3 is a very pale blue and skin4 is a darker blue.
I would be doing my usual hand painting around the mouth and eyes and such so I would Use skin 3 on the highlight areas of the face cheekbones, very lightly, eyebrows, ear tips, nose, chin. Skin4 is in the hollow of the cheeks etc..
I then am done airbrushing. The above picture isn’t the finished piece but is about 90% done, I had not finished all of the hand painting. I probably spend about as much time doing hand painting as I do airbrushing.
His eyes are coated with 2 layers of 5 minute epoxy and the shine on his face is perma-wet from monster makers, makes him look nice and sweaty.
