Welcome to the third Installment of Hobbyist Tactics!

In today’s article we will be wrapping up the detailing on the head of our miniature.

When we left off last month, we had painted the eyes and had the base color for the skin laid down. Today, we will be finishing the skin, detailing the face, and painting the hair. The Face of your miniature is more often than not the focal point on the piece that people’s eyes will naturally gravitate toward. Now that you have painted some great looking eyes, let’s complete the package!

The Skin
When painting highlights, try to visualize in your mind the surface shape of what you are painting, and where the light would be hitting the miniature. On a face, think about what parts of the face stick out the furthest, and what parts sit further back.

•The nose would be coming out the furthest
• The forehead sticks out further than the eye, creating a natural shadow.
• The cheekbones begin to move back out from the eye socket, and often create an area with a natural highlight
• The chin protrudes from the bottom lip, creating another natural highlight.

With this in mind, I target those areas first. To help explain the blending on the face, I have made a quick 4 step set of instructions.

1. Before we begin, make a 50/50 mix of the base color for the skin you used earlier, and a brighter flesh color you would like to use for the highlighted areas.

You may wish to add a tiny bit of water with your brush to this mixture to make it flow easier; this will make blending much easier.

Taking this new mixed shade, get a bit of paint on the tip of your brush, and starting in between the eyes, move down the bridge of the nose in a smooth brush stroke. You may need to do a second stroke.

2. After the nose is highlighted, in a similar fashion, do a line across the eyebrows, starting from one side to the other. Keep this above the dark framing that you did for your eyes, and do not cover the entire forehead. Ideally, think of painting the line 1/4  to 1/3 of the height of the forehead.

Now, add a small oval of this mixture to the cheekbones and chin.

3. Now we start the blending. You may wish to test this on the edge of your palette to get comfortable with it before you apply this technique to your miniature. Wet the brush, then pick up some of your mixed color and lay it down across the forehead line. Moving horizontally from that original line, bring your brush across the forehead over and over, moving upward towards the hairline. Because the paint is thinned out, the subsequent strokes will have less and less pigment in them, and more of the base color will show through. You may need to repeat this technique a few times to get the desired amount of color.

4. Use this same blending technique on the cheekbones. Instead of a horizontal stroke, paint away from the original highlight making a sort of triangular shape, with the point centered in the highlight, and the triangle getting wider as to move towards the jaw line. Repeat on the other cheek, and if needed do multiple coats like on the forehead.

Once this is dry, use the highlight color unmixed, slightly thinned and repeat the process. This time however, try to keep the areas this paint layers smaller than the 50/50 mix, to show through that color, and create a nice gradient.

Depending on your character, you may want the blends smoother or rougher. Typically, I would make the blends on a woman’s face with a softer contrast than I would on a man’s face. It helps emphasize the feminine or masculine qualities of the character.

Hair
I have a much simpler technique for doing hair, which can look quite nice.

First, paint a solid coat of your base color over the entire surface of the hair. Once that is dry, mix a 50/50 blend of the base color with the color you wish to use for the highlights. Using a slightly larger brush, take a bit of this mixed color, then wipe it on a piece of paper towel to remove most of the paint. Once that is done, drag the brush across the base colored hair. This will only hit the raised edges of the hair, leaving the lower areas untouched. This is referred to as dry brushing. Once that’s done, using the pure unmixed highlight color, dry brush the hair again, in a smaller area. I like to just get the top parts of the head and areas around the face with this last dry brush.

Alternatively, so can use the same blending technique that was used on the skin, or use an ink wash to shade the hair. To do an ink wash, simply brush the ink over the area you with to shade. The ink will pool into the recesses and darken them. When using inks, be mindful of the color of the ink and the color you are washing it with. Try to use inks that aren’t too much darker than the color you are shading; yellow hair with a black ink was will not turn out quite the way you would like!

The Rest of the Face
Now that all that is done, there are just a couple of small finishing touches to complete the head! I like to add eye shadow to the women I paint. I’ve decided to go with a white, gold, and green color scheme for my empire models, and since the agent is blonde, I’m going with a green for her makeup. First, put a stroke of dark green across the top of each eye. Then, taking a lighter green, make a thinner stroke along the eye. Finish the eyes off by using a dark brown and making a line across the top of the green eye shadow for the eyebrow. If this ended up being too thick, thin it out with the skin tone.

For the lips, paint both the top and bottom lips with the color you’ve selected. Then, taking a darker color, paint the top lip. The top lip turns inwards towards the mouth, and usually has it’s own natural shadow. After the miniature is done and sealed, it’s sometimes nice to go back and add a touch of gloss varnish to make them shine.

Presto! The head is complete!

Next month, we will be looking at some more general techniques to employ on the body of your miniature, metals!