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I’m working on painting the succubi and incubi in the Demonic Temptations add-on from the Bones 5 Kickstarter (late pledges available). Since painting great looking skin can be a challenge in miniature painting, I thought I’d share some of my progress and process.
The photos above are of the same figure at the same stage of painting. Each picture was taken with a different camera. I’m experimenting with ways to take progress photos at my paint desk as it’s not always possible to use my photo station. These photos are using just my painting lamp. The one on the left is with my good quality camera, the one on the right is with an iPhone X. I will probably write a later post about taking WIP paint desk photos and share more camera comparison pics.
I consulted with Reaper’s art director and the sculptor of these figures (the wonderful Gene Van Horne) for how to approach the skin on these figures. We agreed on more supernatural colour choices. Which is fun, but also covers a lot of ground! I had in mind to do different skin tones for each, incorporating sunset colours like peaches, magentas, and purples, at least for the succubi. I tested several different options, as you can see from the photo below. (The pirate’s vest and head kerchief are two more options. I’d worked on him a bit as a warm-up and decided he could handle being a more colourful pirate.)
Vibrant orange and magenta paint colours are often transparent. It’s just a property of the pigments that create those colours. I’m getting a later start on this project than I had hoped, so part of my testing was to try to eliminate colour schemes that would be unforgiving to touch up or would take a really long time to paint.
In the end I decided to start with a fair skin option and went with the colours I tested on the pirate’s vest. (The black leather is a colour I tested to use on the succubus’ skirt.) These were fairly opaque (and just the purples rather than oranges and magentas), but the colours turned out to be a little fussy to blend. On the palette below you can see the colour steps I mixed to paint the skin with the layering technique. The darkest two or three were really only used for lining the edges where an area of skin meets another limb or a different object, and for lining in between toes and fingers. I’ve discussed a bit about why lining is a powerful technique and how I paint lining in previous posts. Insufficient lining is a common issue for contest entries that I judge at ReaperCon.
You can see from the above colour mixes that there is a wide range of contrast within the skin. Although I was aiming for something on the paler side, there are areas of the body that would appear to be in deep shadow. So that’s an example of what teachers and judges mean when we talk about needing more contrast or going deeper with shadows! (Go to the Home page and scroll down to the Painting Contrast on Miniature Figures section for links to all my previous articles about contrast.)
Just a quick note on my palette and the sponges before I get to more work-in-progress pictures. That is a ceramic palette, the same one that Anne Foerster (designer of the Reaper paint lines) uses on her free Reaper Toolbox Pro Tips videos. I bought several of these from Cheap Joe’s. I have seen a similar palette (and another similar palette) on Amazon for a higher cost. The wells are fairly small, so pools of paint evaporate more slowly than on a flat surface (or a shallow pool of paint in a larger well). When using a welled palette, I am able to control the dilution of the paint pretty precisely. Some water evaporates over time as I’m painting, so I occasionally need to stop and add a drop of water to the paint, or add paint if the pool is getting shallow. I use the sponges to keep the paint workable over several days. I add water to the sponges once or twice a day until they are not quite dripping wet. In between painting sessions I cover the paint wells with the sponges. While I’m painting, if I’m working primarily with shadows, I’ll cover the highlights area with a sponge and vice versa to minimize evaporation.
I usually need to add a little water before I begin to paint the next day, but this method keeps the paint better for me than a wet palette. I do use often use a wet palette for easy mixing and to keep paint in good shape during a painting session, but I rarely use paint on it the next day for anything other than small touch ups. The welled palette approach does use more paint than the wet palette approach, even with conserving paint over several days, but that can be an acceptable trade-off if you need to control the mix colour and/or dilution of the paint very precisely. Welled palettes are also great to have around to mix watery washes and glazes that can make a mess on a wet palette.
The first day I painted in the afternoon and evening. I started with one of the legs. I’m a little bit out of the habit of serious painting. The face is the focal point of the figure, so I wanted to paint a section that was less important first to shake off the dust. I noticed straight away that the blending was much fiddlier than I had expected, but I entertained myself with Google friend chats and audiobooks and just settled into it.
Later in the evening I finished the legs and thought to myself why don’t I paint the face and chest while the paint mixes are still on the fresher side? I finished those areas and took the above picture. So in my mind as I cleaned up following my paint session, I had painted the face and the chest area and just had the arms and torso to go in another paint session. I looked at the figure now and then the rest of the night and the next morning in regular lighting, and I realized wasn’t happy with it. The legs looked good, but the face did not at all stand out on the shelf, and the facial expression wasn’t what I had hoped to achieve.
This is not an unusual experience for me. At least it’s pretty common now. Time was, when I called something done, it was done, and I wouldn’t really study it or return to it unless I had an errant paint stroke or something else like that to fix. Sometimes we do have to call things done and move on rather than fussing over something forever, but a key element to improving in our work is also to look at an in-progress piece when we’re not seated at a brightly-lit desk working on it and see how we think it’s going. You have to give your eyes and your critical judgement skills time to see if there’s a problem, and then do the work of figuring out a solution. It’s very helpful to do that assessment when you’re not in the middle of working on it and in different lighting, and to do that looking at the figure as a whole, not just the part you’re working on at the moment.
After a little thought I realized that the issue with the face as originally painted is that it was overall much too dark. The lighter areas that had a bit of a ‘glow’ were what I liked about the test paint of the vest on the pirate. I had a bit of that effect going on the legs, but very little on the chest and face. And that’s in addition to the fact that it’s usually very visually effective to paint the face and upper portion of the torso lighter than lower areas of the body on a figure. It helps draw the viewer’s eye to focus on the face. I will often start the skin of a face a step or two lighter than the rest of the figure for that reason, and I would have saved myself a little trouble if I had done that here.
I started my next painting session by painting over all the non-shadowed areas of the face with a colour two steps lighter in value and redoing the highlights and shadows on those areas. I went lighter in value and wider in surface area with my highlights and softer with the shadows on the lit areas of both the face and chest. I de-emphasized the nasolabial fold and emphasized the eyelids to shift the expression to fit the character of the sculpt better as well.
Here’s a side by side in case that makes the differences easier to see.
So why did I mess up in the first place? As I mentioned, I haven’t been painting very regularly for a fair while now. I did a bit of painting warm up before starting on these figures, but it was mostly on animal miniatures, so maybe not that great of a choice for a warm-up to painting a lot of skin! I also worked on the face later at night after I’d been painting for hours. I was tired, and I wasn’t putting a lot of deliberate thought into my choices, I was just focused on perfecting all those touchy blends. I should either have called it a night before working on the face, or found a less critical task to work on if I wanted to get more work time in. Either way, it’s nothing to beat myself up about. The important thing is that I listened to the voice telling me something wasn’t quite right and I tried something to fix the problem. Whatever level you’re painting at, you have a lot to remember and try to perform well when painting a figure. It’s not helpful to feel down about yourself if you goof something up!
Here’s a view from another angle. There’s a bit of lighting difference between the photos. I didn’t repaint anything on the legs, I think the light was just in a different location for the second photo. You can see that the revised face is a lot more visible and expressive even from this partially obscured side angle.
About the paint colours… I’m happy to share the recipe, but unfortunately the key paints are all out of production/special promotion paint colours. Sorry about that! These are all Reaper paints. The ones in italics are not currently available for purchase.
Midtone/base colour: 1:1 9679 Drow Nipple Pink : 61118 GREL Flesh
Shadows: Drow Nipple Pink, then 9602 Bruised Purple, mixed with 9307 Red Shadow for deepest shadows
Highlights: GREL Flesh, then 9282 Maggot White, with a bit of Pure White for the brightest highlights on the face
Figures in this Post
The work-in-progress succubus figure is not currently for sale. It’s available for preorder as part of the Bones 5 Kickstarter late pledge. Look for the Demonic Temptations add-on.
The hellborn or tiefilng spellcaster in the test colours photo is available in plastic or in metal.
The pirate is part of the Rum & Bones game from CMON.
The spellcaster holding up an orb is available in plastic or in metal. These were repurposed from my article/video on how to paint hair.
The demoness was part of Bones Kickstarter 4. She has delivered to backers, and will be available for retail sale in late Summer or early Fall.
Bird with a Brush 