How I paint faces

The other day my mates James asked how I paint faces/flesh and while I think its a simple process I tried to explain, figured I'd do like a "step-by-step" to show it with pictures. I am not going to claim this is some "pro-paint" tutorial, just how I paint my minis, so keep that mind. Cheers.

For flesh and faces I generally use only three colours, five if I want to add bit more detail. The colours are:

1. Ratskin Flesh
2. Kislev Flesh
3. Reikland Fleshshade
4. Ceramite White
5. Evil Sunz Scarlet

These are Games Workshop paints, but if you are using a different brand its basically dark flesh colour, bright flesh colour, flesh ink/wash (its kinda brown-ish), white and red.

Step 1 - Base + Wash

To start with I pain the whole face (and any flesh parts) with the base dark flesh colour and wash it. This will make it bit more darker.

As a word of caution, it pays out to take time with the undercoating of a face. More than once I ended up finding out the surface isn't smooth anymore because I used too much paint which left tiny clumps. But its only noticeable when you look super close.

Step 2 - First Highlights

Then I use the same dark flesh colour to start highlights. Its hard to see the difference on a photo but in person you can see the new layer is bit brighter.

Step 3 - Second Highlights

 In this step I sometime go straight to the brightest flesh colour I have and build up highlights with watered-down paint, or first do a layer where I mix the dark and bright and then pure bright.

Step 4 - Details

I don't do this on all models, but when I do I mix some white into the bright flesh do to small very bright highlights on the cheek, nose and sometime chin.

The red is for female models, where I also mix it with flesh to tone it down and then pain the bottom lip to make it stand out.

Step 5 - Eyes

Lastly, when the model has big enough eyes I first pain a strip of white horizontally and then put in a dot of black. Sometime I do it in three steps there I do big black stripe first, then white and then pupils. It is often a painful process so I am looking for a better way, but it does the job.

Alternative (faster) way

On some models I combined Step 1, 2 and 3. I paint the face with dark colour, do strong highlights with the bright colour on top and then wash it to blend it in. I do this on older miniatures where the faces are small, or when you can't see much of the face.

Also for line troops I don't often do Step 4 and 5, even without details and eyes they still look good on the table. Below are some more explames of faces I have done for my Japanese Sectorial Army.