Painting tan skin

Blair asked me how I painted my skin, so I thought I'd post that. While Shawn is certainly 1000x better than me, I thought that this might have a bit of merit as my techniques are sort of dumbed down from shawn's advice, so that any idiot (as demonstrated by my models) can use it.

What you need:
A eye dropper with clean water in it
a plastic pallette for mixing
toothpicks
the following Americana paints - available super cheap at hobby lobby
Black (normal black)
White (normal white)
Toffee (actual name)
Flesh (actual name)
Games Workshop's Ogryn Flesh wash from their new washes line

I use the pallette and eye dropper to water down my paint. Ususally I do one small squirt of paint and add one drop of water. I then mix completely with a toothpick. Shawn recommends the consistancy of milk, but I don't drink milk, so I just get it roughly close.

1 - I start by basecoating my entire miniture with black.

2 - I then dry brush the skin areas white, so this leaves the raised areas white, the recessed areas black, and the middle areas sorta gray.

3 - I then paint the skin with toffe, which has been mixed with water as above.

4 - after this dries, I go over the skin again with toffe. Usually I might add another drop of water to really thin the toffe down, before I repaint it.

5 - I then water down some "Flesh" paint and pick out the raised, high light areas. This is a paint that has a pinkish hue, but it'll look better once I tie it in.

6 - I then use the "Ogryn Flesh" was all over the recessed areas of the model. The new GW washes are really, really good and can be used straight out of the pot. I really like them.

7 - to tie it all in, I go back to the toffee. I use a really, really thin mix (2 drops of water to 1 drop of paint) and paint over almost all of the skin area. Just leaving the very extreme edges and crevices alone. I find that this sort of blends teh "flesh," "toffee," and "Ogryn Flesh" areas together nicely.

Thats it. Its not great, but it has really been good for my skill level. It doesn't take a ton of steps, and I've been really happy with it. I had not had any successful skin paint jobs until Ogres, so I am pretty happy, and I owe most of my success technique wise to Shawn's advice. Hope that helps.

Test Angel Completed

Well, I am proud to announce I have finished my test angel. Its not awesome, but I am happy with it. I think the blues, golds, and off white look fairly good together. Obviously she needs a base, but you get the idea. Feel free to comment. I also will throw in a nearly completed unit of 10 flaggelants... I need to buy some more of those guys asap.