Painting Skin With 4 Colours

The skin on this bust was painted using just 4 colours. It was something I found on Pinterest which was a guide on mixing flesh tones, mainly for oils, but I wondered if I could apply the same technique with my acrylic paints. This model was a practice piece anyway so it didn't really matter if my experiment went horribly wrong!

The guide does not have any revolutionary new ways of doing things, this is a very commonly used technique. 

Basically you take the following paints: Cadmium Red, Yellow Ochre, Ultramarine Blue, Titanium White. 

As I do not have these colours in acrylics I then thought what is the closest colours I do have? So I picked Mephiston Red, Averland Sunset and Ceremite White (all GW) and Blue from the Vallejo air range. 

The guide recommends the following: 

• Think in terms of light and shadow
• Use a limited palette 
• Mix the main colours first - light flesh and dark flesh
• Avoid adding white to your shadows (this I found was terribly difficult not to do!)
• Mix accent colours to add interest

Although the guide gives you receipts which are helpful to start off with I quickly found I was just making my own blends to suit what I needed on the face. 

So for light flesh = CR + YO + TW

Shadow flesh = CR + YO + UB

From here I just played around with the colours. It is worth remembering that often you may look at a colour on your palette and think, eww, but actually it doesn't look that bad on your mini. 

The guide I used can be found here.

Painting the Mini

In the first instance you need to choose where your light source is coming from. I had already chosen this as her robes had been done earlier in the year. Every mini has a 'golden angle' I picked this and went from there. 

Once this has been picked then I started blocking in where my shadows would be: 

At this point you are just sketching with very watered down paint, so it always looks messy at this point, this is just how I paint, I use very thin layers; glazing/layering. Sorry I'm not great with the terminology, I just paint. 

From here you are then just alternating between light and dark building up the layers of paint smoothing the blends as you go. At one point I think I got fed up with her looking like an extra from The Land of the Living Dead, so started to paint her eyes and put some colour on her lips. I was also using a reference photo of someone I found on Pinterest with similar colours to what my mini had which helped. It just helps bring the mini to life and adds interest whilst you are painting. 

It is worth remembering that at this scale if you were to paint her eyes true to life they wouldn't stand out, and you need the eyes to pop as this is where the viewer's eyes are drawn to first and I wanted them to mirror the blue of the cloak. Having a very pointed brush for this detail is imperative! I used a #2 SER33 Rosemary & Co. brush for all the face work. A size 000 brush will not help here, with these brushes you put paint on the tip and in the time you've gone to move your hand from the palette to the model the paint has dried! A larger brush barrel with a nice point enables you to work longer. 

So from here you are just continuing to build up layers, smooth with glazes, deepen shadows, lighten areas where light is hitting the skin. It was at this point I decided to make her eyes really pop by adding dots of white and light reflections, you also need to add shadow to the whites of the eyes and reflect light off the bottom of the eyelids.  

Useful Tip

Another thing to remember whilst you are painting the face is that there are colours zones to bear in mind, again the internet, Pinterest has a hive of in formation on this. But generally the brow will be more yellow/white in colour, the cheeks and nose a pinky-red colour and the lower face a teal/grey colours. Just be careful of this last one, I ended up giving her a 5 o'clock shadow at one point which wasn't very flattering! And took me forever to get rid of. There are some extra details to this to also consider that I tried to apply to this mini: cooler blue under the eyes, desaturated nose bridge, blush cheeks and pink lips and yellow labil inferioris, which are the corners of the mouth. 

At this point I was gradually getting where I wanted to be she still wasn't as smooth as I wanted her to be and I hadn't quite got the shadows right but I just continued to apply glazes and add details. Taking photographs helps so much in this process and stepping away from a painting so you can sit and study the photos to see where you need to make changes. As you can see in the last photo she was pretty much there and I also started painting the detail on her dress in yellow highlighting with a little white in places. 


I struggled a bit with the hair, and the 4 colour palette didn't help here so I returned to some other GW paints to finish this off. I could have done more on the hair, but in all honesty this was mainly a study for the skin so I wasn't too worried. 

I am just glad to say that my experiment was a complete success and I will be painting skin in this way again, although I think I will be investing in some high quality acrylic paints to see if there is any difference between paints when using this technique. 

I should probably also explain my reasons for doing it in the first place. I have a terrible habit of using far too many paints when I'm painting. A good example being her blue dress, I think I used about 11 paints in total for this! And I get very fed up of paints cluttering my desk. I was going to use Darren Latham's female face guide that he had on YouTube, but even that guide uses 11 paints. So I set myself a challenge, and I'm glad I did because I learned so much from it. 

I hope this has proved helpful in someway and motivates you to challenge yourself. You can find more pictures of her on my Instagram and Facebook pages, and if you have any questions just DM me!

Lisa