The Heart of the Miniature

Is, in my opinion the face. It gives the figure life and is the aspect that makes us believe its a little human being.

For that reason I always like to paint the face early on in the process. It sort of makes me feel like the figure is coming alive and helps me push on to get the rest of the painting done.

So a few rules I apply to face painting on 25mm (I'm old school! 😁) figures .....

1. Paint the face to the very best of your ability, time spent on this aspect of the figure will pay you back more than any other element of the paintjob. A well painted face on an otherwise "averagely" painted figure will still look like a good figure overall, conversely, a poor face on an otherwise well painted figure will really drag the rest of the figure down.

2. Do not paint eyes on 25mm figures, unless you do this perfectly (and I do mean perfectly) it will ruin the face, make it look like a google eyed zombie, add nothing, and take your time to no real value.

So what's my technique?

I have five steps ......

1. Paint the whole face (and for that matter any other flesh on the figure) with Foundry Flesh 5a
2. Once dry, wash over with Coat d'arms Ink wash "Chestnut"137 (this is an old Citadel paints wash that I used to use when they made it, it worked for me and I've never changed, luckily it's still being made by someone else under this brand)

Having done this the face will look like this

Once the wash has dried (won't take too long as it's only water based). I then do the following

3. Repaint the face with Foundry Flesh 5a, but this time leave the deep recesses still showing the underlying colour
4. Highlight the bulk of the raised parts of the face with Foundry Flesh 5b
5. Finish by adding very small amounts of Foundry Flesh 5c to the bridge of the nose, the upper cheeks and point of the chin only.

The overall effect will be something like this

It's a fairly simple variation of using the standard foundry "flesh" palette, but it gives a really good effect (well at least I think it does! 😊)

So, now the figures are "alive" time to start adding more colour .....