Troggoth Painting Skin Guide

As I am currently unable to get hold of a webcam due to them being snapped up by everyone working from home, I thought I would try and do a blog post on how I paint skin. Following up on my earlier post on the technical side of things with the Sara bust I painted, this is how I go about it. 

Using the troggoths that I have been painting recently my process can be summed up in a few steps: 

1) lay down a good base coat, in the troggs case, this was Celestial Grey


2) sketch in the shadows

    This is probably one of the main steps. As this is where I establish where my shadows and highlights are going to go and will set me up for the rest of the painting. 

Using my own mix of Navy Blue (scale colour), Naggroth Night and Magos Purple, I sketched in where I wanted the shadows to be: 


As you can see this stage is pretty messy, as I'm using a very thinned paint in order to establish the values I need on the mini. Don't feel disheartened at this point as you are going to tidy it up!

In order to establish your highlights and shadows you need to figure out where your light source is coming from, in this mini it is coming off to the right hand side (as you look at the picture. You can of course have various light sources, as light bounces all over the place, but when you are starting out, I recommend only dealing with one light source and don't overwhelm yourself with too many. 

3) sketch in the highlights. 




In this photo I used Cadian Fleshtone for my highlight and placed it where I knew light would be hitting the troggoth from my imaginary light source. Using a lamp for this step will be helpful. 

4) clarify the shadows and highlights

by this I mean tidy up basically, cleaning up the messiness by applying more layers over the sketch to smooth it all out and blend in-between the two. For this I mainly used Warpfiend Grey, it's a great mid-tone for this scheme.





5) from here you can then continue to build up contrast by doing as much layering of colours as you want to. You can make the shadows much darker and make the highlights much brighter. I stopped here as these are only tabletop standard, if they were competition level I would want to build on the contrast a lot more. like I did for my Isbiliya model. 


You can use this sketching of shadows and highlights technique pretty much for anything you paint, be it hair, cloth, or stone etc, using it as a pre-painting basis for other techniques as well, say weathering or adding texture. 

I hope this is helpful. Any questions I'm always happy to help. 

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