What oil for faces?

Modeling Subjects Figures and Misc.
1

I’ve seen someone here on the forums doing nice faces using oils with only 3-4 layers… What kind of oil colours do I use? What order? Any nice tips?

Thanks.

-Huxy

2

I use Grumbacher and Reeve’s…Don’t do layers though. I paint the face flesh, usually with Model Master Radome Tan or Testor’s Flat Tan (1167) and then do the shading and blending with oils.

3

If someone wants to spend the time writing out their face painting techniques here, well fine, go for it. But I think it would be easier to just point you to some that are already written. There are literally dozens of books on this subject, as well as many tutorials on several well known modeling sites. Here are some;

http://www.missing-lynx.com/articles/figures/mbheads/mbheads.htm

http://www.missing-lynx.com/articles/figures/mbface/mbface.htm

http://www.missing-lynx.com/articles/figures/mbpart2/mbpart2.htm

You can’t go wrong with starting out with Sheperd Paine’s How to Build Dioramas, which has an easy to follow guide to painting figures with oils. Kalmbach Books’ How to Build Scale Models has a chapter on painting figures with oils. Osprey publishes several titles on figure painting as well.

I work in at least 5 layers myself, a base color, a highlight, a reddish cheek/lip color, a shadow and a dark shadow. Cutting this down to 3 or 4 doesn’t really make sense to me. Which tone would you leave out?

4

Thanks there, Kykeon. Really helped. I get going at training this right away![:D]

-Huxy

5

Guess I didn’t understand “layers”, since I don’t paint over the entire face. I do the shadows and highlights over the base color, but only count it as two “layers”, since I don’t cover the entire base color with more paint. Dark shadows and the “5 O’clock shadow” I do in pastels instead of paint… Same with shadows on uniforms, pastels are more forgiving and don’t “build-up” a thickness of paint…

6

A layer, at least to me, doesn’t necessarily cover the entire surface of the face, just a change in which color you are applying. Lip and cheek color are little more than spots, which are then blended in.

After decades of mixing my own flesh tones with oil paints, I’ve canned them in favor of a much simpler approach. Model Master Acrylics makes the aforementioned flesh tones, which takes the hassle out of trying to mix your own, time after time. The only other thing you need is a bottle of Acrylic Retarder, available at art supply stores, to slow down the drying time and allow you to blend the different colors just as you would oil paints. This saves me a lot of time and trouble. While this isn’t my best figure, it does show that the process works;