Let's Skin this Duder

Skin, besides faces it is probably one of the hardest things for people to paint. Because, we as humans can recognize what natural skin looks like. And as such it’s easy to identify what looks odd or out of place.

I hope you all had a good weekend. I only had one goal in mind this weekend: Determine if I liked the color I choose for the torso base color. I left off last time with a patchy covering which left a bad taste in my mouth. I wanted to fully cover the skin and make a decision after that before I made the decision to pivot or not.

After I finished coverage on the back, I moved on to the front of the model. What made this difficult was the head and the hair he had. I should have attached only the head or the left arm, not both. This made it difficult to paint under the arm and his left torso, as a result I got a lot of paint on other features of the model.

Which is fine because I haven’t painted them. However, I did learn from that mistake: I need to finish the torso before I can move on to the hair, spear, armor. This is fine because it gives me a marching order to follow, it is a bit restrictive so I’ll have to keep this in mind for future projects.

After the coverage was good I was very content with the color. It’s a nice pale color, I’ll have to darken it at some point somehow. To make it more interesting I want to try some free hand as well. Something Slavic in design as that is the believed origin of the Erlking. I really like the two designs below:

I’ll inspire my freehand off of these. More on that next time, for now I’m going to call it and begin work on that next time.