Faces are small, and that works in your favour. A miniature face is a few millimetres across, which means nobody is examining your blending. What people do notice, from across a table, is whether the face reads as a face: whether there is clear separation between the shadowed and lit areas.
Get that contrast right and a simply painted face looks good. Get it wrong and no amount of careful detail work rescues it.
The most important principle: contrast
At tabletop scale, a face is understood through light and shadow before it is understood through colour. The eye sockets, the underside of the nose, the line under the lower lip and the area beneath the cheekbones need to be visibly darker than the forehead, the bridge of the nose, the cheekbones and the chin.
A face painted in one flat skin tone, however well chosen, reads as a blank oval at 60cm. A face with three clear values reads as a face even if the painting is rough.
This means the shadow and highlight steps matter far more than the base colour. Beginners tend to spend their effort choosing the perfect skin tone and then apply it flat. Reverse that priority.
The workflow
- Base skin colour. Apply your chosen midtone across the whole face, thinned so it does not fill the eye sockets or the mouth line. Two thin coats.
- Establish the recess shade. Apply a darker tone into the recesses: eye sockets, either side of the nose, under the lower lip, under the cheekbones, into the hairline and any wrinkles. A thinned darker skin tone or a brown-toned shade works. Let it settle.
- Restore the raised areas. Bring the midtone back over the forehead, the nose bridge, the cheeks and the chin, leaving the shade in the recesses. This step is what creates the contrast; skipping it leaves the face muddy.
- Highlight selectively. A lighter tone on the brow ridge, the bridge and tip of the nose, the cheekbones and the point of the chin. Keep it small and confined to the parts that genuinely catch light from above.
- Optional final accents. A very light touch on the very tip of the nose and the highest point of the cheekbone. Lips slightly warmer or darker than the surrounding skin.
- Treat the eyes only if appropriate. See below. This is optional and frequently better skipped.
Four steps produce a good tabletop face. Everything after that is refinement.
You do not always need to paint the whites of the eyes
This is the single most useful piece of advice for anyone struggling with faces.
Painted whites with a pupil are what most people picture when they think about eyes, but at miniature scale they very often look worse than the alternative. Slightly oversized whites produce a startled, staring expression, and getting two pupils identical is genuinely difficult.
The alternative is to leave the eye socket in shadow, with a dark tone in the recess and perhaps a very fine darker line where the eye sits. At normal viewing distance this reads as a shadowed eye and looks entirely natural. Many professionally painted display models use exactly this approach on rank-and-file troops.
Reserve painted whites for characters viewed up close, and even then only if you are confident.
Painting eyes, if you attempt them
- Shade the socket first so there is a dark recess to work into.
- Place a small amount of off-white, never pure white, into the socket. Use very little paint on a well-pointed brush.
- Let it dry fully.
- Add the pupil as a small dark dot or a short vertical line. A line is more forgiving than a dot because slight misplacement reads as looking sideways rather than as a mistake.
- Correct the surrounding skin. This is the step that makes eyes work. Repaint your skin midtone tightly around the eye to trim the whites down to the right size and shape.
Step five is not optional. Almost nobody paints eyes accurately first time; they paint them approximately and then trim them with skin tone. If both eyes end up looking wrong, repaint the whole face area and start again. It takes minutes. Our guide to fixing painting mistakes covers the reset.
Painting different skin tones
Human skin covers an enormous range of hues, values and undertones, and it is not well served by the idea of a single "flesh" colour. That naming convention is a historical artefact of the paint industry rather than a useful description of anything.
A more practical way to think about it is that any skin tone is built from three decisions:
- Value. How light or dark the midtone is. This is the largest single factor.
- Undertone. Whether the colour leans warm (towards red, orange, gold) or cool (towards olive, blue, violet). Most skin has a discernible undertone and matching your shadow and highlight to it is what makes the result convincing.
- Saturation. How intense the colour is. Skin is generally less saturated than people paint it; heavily saturated skin tones look sunburnt or artificial.
Some generic starting structures, described by their colour character:
| Approach | Midtone | Shadow | Highlight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pale, cool undertone | Light desaturated pink-grey | Muted violet-brown | Midtone plus a pale cool cream |
| Pale, warm undertone | Light warm peach | Warm red-brown | Midtone plus ivory |
| Mid, olive undertone | Muted yellow-green-brown | Deep olive-brown | Midtone plus a warm sand |
| Mid, warm undertone | Warm mid brown | Deep red-brown | Midtone plus a warm tan |
| Deep, warm undertone | Rich dark brown | Very dark brown with red bias | Midtone plus a warm mid brown |
| Deep, cool undertone | Dark brown with violet bias | Near-black brown | Midtone plus a soft grey-brown |
Two technical notes that apply across all of them. First, do not shade with black or highlight with white; both kill the undertone and make skin look grey and lifeless. Shade and highlight within the same colour family. Second, deeper skin tones need proportionally more highlight contrast rather than less, because the available range below the midtone is narrower, and skin at any value is reflective. The temptation to under-highlight darker skin is what makes it read as a flat mass.
Non-human skin follows exactly the same construction. Pick a midtone, decide the undertone, shade and highlight within that family.
Beards and stubble
Paint a beard as its own area with its own base, shade and highlight, not as a flat block of colour on top of skin. Even a rough highlight along the lower edge and on any raised strands gives it shape.
Stubble is different. It is a subtle shift in the skin tone rather than a separate colour. Mix a small amount of a cool grey or muted blue-grey into your skin midtone and glaze it very thinly over the jaw and upper lip. Thin is essential; anything opaque reads as a painted-on beard rather than growth.
Scars
Keep them restrained and small. A scar is usually a fine line of a colour slightly lighter and slightly pinker than the surrounding skin, with a very thin darker line along one side to suggest depth. Two thin strokes.
Bright red scars look like fresh wounds, which is rarely the intention, and thick scars look like scratches in the paint.
Bald heads
A bald head is a large smooth curved surface, which makes it harder than a face, because there is nowhere for shadow to hide and any texture in your paint shows.
Thin your paint more than usual and build up in several coats. Establish shadow at the back and base of the skull and around the ears, and put your highlight on the top and front where light would land. A gentle gradient across the dome reads far better than a flat tone.
Faces at tabletop distance
Before you decide a face has gone wrong, put the model on the table and step back to normal viewing distance.
Faces that look crude at 15cm frequently look excellent at a metre, because the eye stops resolving individual brush strokes and reads only the light and shadow pattern. Conversely, a face that looks beautifully blended up close but has no value contrast will disappear entirely at distance.
Judge at the distance the model will be seen.
Common face-painting mistakes
- Insufficient contrast. The most common problem by a wide margin. Be bolder with shadows than feels comfortable.
- Shading with black. Produces grey, dead-looking skin. Use a darker version of the skin's own colour family.
- Highlighting with pure white. Same problem in reverse.
- Paint too thick. Faces have the finest detail on a model and fill up fastest. Thin everything. Our guide to thinning paints covers this.
- Eyes too large. Trim them back with skin tone, or leave them shadowed.
- Over-saturated skin. Mute the midtone; skin is less colourful than it looks.
- Doing the face last when tired. It is the highest-attention part of the model. Do it when you are fresh.
Frequently asked questions
What size brush should I use?
The point matters more than the size. A size 1 with a genuinely sharp tip outperforms a size 000 that has splayed. Very small brushes hold almost no paint and dry out mid-stroke.
Should I paint the face before assembling the model?
If the head sits deep in a hood or collar, painting it as a sub-assembly is much easier. For an open head, assemble normally.
How do I make a face look older?
Deepen the shadows in the existing wrinkles and add slight shadow under the eyes and along the nose-to-mouth lines. Reduce the saturation of the midtone slightly. Do not paint wrinkles that are not sculpted.
Why does my skin look grey?
Almost always black in the shade or white in the highlight. Both desaturate the colour towards grey. Rebuild the shadow and highlight from the skin's own hue family.
How long should a face take?
Ten to fifteen minutes for a solid tabletop result, without eyes. Considerably longer for a character with painted eyes and blended transitions. If you are new, our beginner painting guide covers where faces fit in the sequence.
Independent guide published by Blubbercove Ltd/WarSplay. This article is not affiliated with, sponsored by, endorsed by, authorised by or licensed by Games Workshop Limited. Warhammer 40,000 is a trade mark of Games Workshop Limited.