 Hello, everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video. Today, we are going to talk about one of the most challenging areas of the model to paint that's also one of the most important, and that is the face. This area of tiny detail is the first thing people generally look at with your miniatures, so let's get it right. So with that, let's get into it. Alright, so for our face, we need skin, and for skin, we keep a relatively simple palette. I'm going to start here with just thin layers of paint, using a brush that's pretty crappy just to get the paint down. All the paints will scroll across the top, so I'm not going to re-read them to all of you. But one note I will make is that all of these layers you see me applying, I'm applying at least two coats of it. I suppose we all honor Duncan Rhodes in our own way. The other note that I will say is that you'll see me mix yellow oxide throughout this. Skin tone, especially Caucasian skin tone, is very derivative of the color orange, and since these are so red, I want to bring some of that yellow back into it with the oxide to balance it out, make it feel warmer. This guy is a barbarian from the plains, so he should have that sun-kissed look. In addition, yellow being much more transparent means it's much easier to layer up my highlights while still keeping the transitions smooth. When we talk about painting the face, the first and most important thing is the front of the face and respecting the T-section, which this guy has extremely furrowed brows, so we're highlighting those, but it's the T-line across the top of the eyebrows, down the center of the nose to the chin, above the lips, and then across the cheeks. Think of it like a lowercase T laid over a capital T. Now how much you accentuate the eyebrows really depends on the individual's sculpt and whether or not the sculptor has their brow extremely furrowed, like this guy, he looks all angry, grr, he's an angry boy, so you know, hence we have to really push up the eyebrows. As he's bald, we'll also be pushing the same highlights onto the top of his bald head. As a fellow member of the Society of Bald People, I certainly understand reflection points on the top of your oily head. Now as I push these layer highlights, you'll notice my transitions here. Each additional layer is really barely moving the color. I worked with a lot of mixes, just slowly, slowly integrating the beige-red and then eventually the ice-yellow. Doing the paint thin and working it with at least two applications over the whole face of each paint layer. Now as per standard with layering, and from my recent video you saw this, we are with layers we cover more than we think each time. I'm doing this so that we get something pretty smooth as we build it up and we don't have to try to glaze over as we go. Because acrylic paint is translucent and because skin is also translucent, yes that's true, put a flashlight up to the back of your hand and you'll see just how translucent your skin is. We can actually simulate skin very effectively with these translucent paint layers, each time just allowing a little bit of color from the layer above show through the edges. Not only does it give us smooth transitions, but that slight tonal variation in visual confusion that's caused by having multiple, multiple, multiple thin, barely shifting paint layers very accurately captures skin. Now as his brow is furrowed a couple of times you're going to see me take thin, thin lines across the center of his furrowed brow, that's just to capture the little light lines and bring out that detail of the sculpt. Where you really see me focusing is along the furrowed brow, the tops of the cheekbones, he's sucking in his cheeks too, he has these really weird depressions on his cheeks, he has a very extreme face. But along the bottom of the jawbone where it would stick out, the tops of the cheeks, the bottom of the jawbone, the nose, both the entire ridge plus the little side nostrils, the top of the lip and the chin. Those are the areas we're going to build toward. Now often we are covering a lot more than that. That's because as we build these layers slowly, once we start integrating ice yellow it's going to jump very fast as you can see here, this is a very bright paint, it also has a much higher opacity. So we're building toward those areas. Now remember when you're painting things like skin tones and faces and using these paints here, they look much brighter when you first apply them than when they dry. This is because wet paint always looks much brighter. Once it dries and the water evaporates, the glossy reflection goes away and the paint seems to dull or dim, really it's just showing its true color. So always let your layers dry completely in between each application. You can see though I'm covering less, I still go farther and build toward those peaks that I mentioned. Now I'm going to jump in here because you might think, wow Vince, that looks pretty bad. Why does he look like a clown? Why is it so contrasted? Two reasons. One, we always over highlight because we're going to bring it back together with some glazes in a moment, but two, it actually looks so bright because I didn't paint the rest of the skin on his body. So I went ahead and did that and now let's look at what a difference that makes with no other work done. Like magic, he looks less like a clown just because the nature of having other colors around it suddenly balanced out the face and made it feel more in line. The next thing we need to do along that same line to balance colors is get the other things that aren't skin tone blocked out. I'm taking some Rhinox Hide here to get the thin line in the lip as well as covering the lip itself. So he's going to be a happy little Goth Barbarian princess for a moment. And then we're going to start smoothing everything out. Now comes the smoothing phase. We begin by glazing some of our deepest tone, smoothing out the shadows, glazing some shadow flesh. Then we go ahead and glaze our mid-tone, our beige-red plus yellow oxide over that transition. And each of these I'm working quite thin, just looking to smooth out these transitions knock back some of the highlights and make sure that everything has again layer upon layer upon layer. Because these translucent layers of paint of beige-red plus ice yellow or yellow ochre or something like that, laying on top of the red tones will still show a little bit of that red seeping through, which will feel very much like your skin, which is that, which is some kind of tone placed over bloody muscles and capillaries and things like that. So it communicates the same sort of thing. It makes you feel like you're looking at a real person with real skin tones and real layers of muscle and blood and bone underneath there. Now I glaze all the way up to my highest highlights. Going all the way to the ice yellow, slowly integrating that in, because I want to really make sure I'm building out the exact areas. And when you're glazing these final layers in, this is where we do the extreme detail work. This is where I'm picking out the ridges on his furrowed brow, the very, the tip of his nose and his nostrils, the tops of his cheekbones, the little bony protrusions from his heavily cleft square jawed chin, you know, those kinds of areas. And you can see how it forms this T shape across his face in two different places. I'm also pushing the top right portion of his forehead there you saw, because, well, I've looked at myself in the mirror and I know where light reflects off of a bald head. So there you go. But the thing you want to think about here is as you work down, you're slowly working toward tighter and tighter detail. Now we need to bring in a little color into his cheeks, his rosy cheeks. Cheeks are naturally red, whether reinforced by makeup or not. So I put a little glaze, a little red in there. And then I have off camera, I glaze a little beige red plus yellow mix over the top, because I went a little too strong. Bringing out the lips. Do not use a bright pink color lips, especially male lips are rarely bright pink. That I'm using a pretty burnt red plus a little brown to lay down the base and then integrating a little mid tone red and then eventually some ice yellow just for cracks in the lips. And then finally over that a glaze of a regular mid tone red just to really show those cracks and divots and texture we have on the lips. Painting the eyes. You can paint these first if you're not as confident. I will say filming this almost killed me. I apologize for the lighting change, but I had to reorient my camera and everything just to actually get this done on camera. But the key with painting eyes and I have whole videos on this is a nice well flowing paint and extremely sharp brush and a careful hand. It's just practice. With that done I also then re-lined the bottom of his eyes since I went a little too heavy with the ice yellow. With the eyes and the lips in place and showing that light reflection of the lip we can return back to finishing touches. Here we're glazing some rikelin flesh shade again adding slightly more red tone over the top of the skin tone back and forth back and forth. These multiple multiple multiple repeating translucent layers are what sells the effect of skin tone and achieves very smooth transitions all at the same time. Lastly he couldn't be a rough and tough barbarian if he didn't have a little five o'clock shadow. And five o'clock shadow is so easy. A quick glaze of Drakenhof nightshade or any similar blue-black. The lower part of male faces tends to be blue in the spectrum when you think about true color and so all we do is just glaze a little bit of that over the area and it will immediately look like five o'clock shadow. It is the easiest trick in the world that also makes your miniature look super awesome. You can do the same thing on his bald head or the back of his bald head if you want to give the impression of a shaved head there. So there we go. He's all done. I think this face came out pretty well. And as you can see, it wasn't too tricky. I mean, other than those stupid eyes, which nearly killed me. But this isn't a video about painting eyes. It's about the larger face. So if you like this, give it a like. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. If you've got a question I didn't answer, drop that down below. I always answer every question asked in the videos. But as always, I thank you so much for watching this one. I really hope you enjoyed it and we'll see you next time.