Skintone painting – INTRODUCTION

Hi painters!

First of all the boring thing, presentations and all that stuff. My name is Aythami Alonso and I am passionate about painting and sculpting figures. I began painting like three years ago when I had neither job nor money. The crazy idea of painting miniatures to earn money came to me and… man! it really was a crazy idea. I earned nothing!

Today the story is different, a bit I guess. I give painting courses, paint commissions and I am working on my own brand of figures, NotOriginalMinis. Hopefully it will be out very soon (or maybe is out right now by the time Jason has published this article). Although is a very hard world to make a living from. I will never become rich or get close to it. But I can´t complain, I can say I work on what I like. That means a lot within the world we live.

Well, some other things I like to do is writing articles. It helps me storing concepts and techniques in my mind and also helps other painters.

PAINTING THE GATEKEEPER

This article tells how to paint with a chaotic technique the figure of the Gatekeeper of Nocturna Models. Really the best figure I have ever painted on terms of sculpture. Pedro Fernandez rocks!

Here we go!

Stage 1

My mind blows up searching for inspiration when I see a Conan picture from the old comics. That saturation and darkness is awesome.

I wanted to paint something like that so I began to copy it on the figure. I mix Desert Sand with Brown and Orange to paint the base colour. All vallejo.

I work giving strong strokes at the beginning. With the paint not too much diluted. This type of painting is very dirty but I will clean it up in several stages. I place first shadows adding black to the base and move on.

Stage 2

Now that I have the shadows strongly placed I began to clean the area with a very diluted base colour, like a wash. As you can see, the skin is cleaner now.

The technique is quite simple: be aggressive with strong strokes at the beginning and clean it up with very diluted washes. Much faster than giving only glazes.

Stage 3

Here we go with the lights. My favourite part! Studying the anatomy and developing my own interpretation. I place the lights strongly adding bone to the base colour.

Stage 4

Washing machine! Here you can see the effectiveness of the technique. In a few stages we have the area like we had given a lot of thin glazes. When I have the area cleaned up, I begin adding pop to my lights and clean again if it´s necessary.

I add a bit of green on the shadows to give the skin that Conan appearance. Talking about colours, I think the recipe of the colours we use is not an important matter but the correct place for the illumination yes. If this fails, colours will suck. Study and copy anatomy!

Stage 5

Focusing on the face. This is the most important part of the figure. I try to give very very thin strokes to represent wrinkles and natural shapes. This is necessary to achieve a realistic looking face.

Always try to copy reality. I give strokes with pure bone.

I decide which parts I want to pop up. Upper part of the forehead , some wrinkles, nose, etc. Red tones are also given to achieve variation in tones and create areas of interest.

Nipples are very important here (don´t think dirty..). If we paint red parts on the face we need another point of red on the skin to tie the interpretation together. The spectator sees more natural points to drop the view.

It creates a connection between these points. I try to follow this line of thought in all the figures I paint to achieve this not aggressive and smooth looking appearance between painted parts.

Stage 6

I washed the area previously and decided to give another Bang! to the highlights.

That’s it by now folks! The idea for this article was to show you how to paint aggressively, without fears, giving strong strokes and then clean it up with washes. I think you can speed up your time using it.

I hope you enjoyed the reading and learned some new things. It´s a pleasure for me to collaborate with the community and leave the little knowledge I have to you. I also want to thank Jason for the opportunty to collaborate with this site!

If you have any question you can contact me at Facebook.

See you painters!

Aythami Alonso