Caucasian Flesh Recipes

Caucasian Flesh Recipes




One project nearly every miniature painter needs to tackle at some point is painting human/elf/dwarf flesh. If you are new to the task, likely you'll ask your friends or aquaintences online what recipes they use, and for nearly everyone you ask, you may get a different answer. With miniature painting's increasing online presance, many time these folks who answer you back may not be local to you, and they may not have examples of how their recipes look available online. If you are an experienced painter with a favorite recipe or two of your own, the desire to branch out, create variety in your miniatures collection, or just try for something different, can be beset by th same difficulties. Even looking at the pictures of the bottles online or in your local store doesn't really give you an idea of what they may look like all mixed and blended together on your favortie miniature. In an effort to give people a bit more information on which to make these decisions I have collected a number of flesh recipes using some of the most commonly used and widely available paint brands, and present them here for your reference. Please note this is not intended to be a HowTo on techniques for painting flesh. There are many tutorials out there that do that topic justice better than I could. I assume for the most part that you have your own techniques worked out; This is merely for a visual reference on the way colors look together. If you're a serious blender, or a stripe/block painter, you should be able to extrapolate how things will look using your method from my examples. While I have provided 4 pictures of each recipe, there may be more than 4 layers present. I tried to paint these at a consistent table-top quality, which for me means that I'll mix the base and the main color a couple times in different proportions, so between Color 1 and Color 2 might actually represent 3 or 4 layers instead of just 2. That is just my style of painting. The pictures however are the milestones or keyframes if you like, of where things reached the pure color of the next bottle.
Paint Color Legend








VG: Vallejo Game Color
VM: Vallejo Model Color
GW: Citadel/Games WorkShop

P3: Privateer Press
AC: Andrea Color
WF: Wargames Foundry

DC: Delta Ceramcoat

Note: Delta Ceramcoat is probably the exception to the 'widely available' clause above, as I believe it is only available in the US. It is ubiquitous in US craft stores however, so I feel it is worth including. It is a cheap craft paint, similar to those sold in the UK and EU. I believe the popular UK analog is Anita's. If you wish to find a color analog to any of the paints listed here I reccomend a trip over to the most excellent Paint Line Match project, provided by Silicon Dragons.
On to the pictures! The 1st 3 images each show the figure at the 'pure' stage of the color listed. In the 4th image I've blocked in the rest of the figure in black to clean up the look, and then done some shading with inks and washes to show how the recipe looks with a little finish. For most of these this was the base color and a mix of smoke/brown inks.








Recipe #1:

Tan(VG)
Salmon Rose(VM)
Pale Flesh(VG)




Recipe #2:

Red Leather(VM)
Dwarf Skin(VG)
Flat Flesh(VM)




Recipe #3:

Tanned Flesh(GW)
Dwarf Flesh(GW)
Elf Flesh(GW)




Recipe #4:

Iridian Flesh(P3)
Khardic Flesh + Midlund FLesh(P3)
Midulnd Flesh + Rynland Flesh(P3)




Recipe #5:

Tan(VG)
Dwarf Skin(VG)
Elf Flesh(GW)




Recipe #6:

Red Leather(VM)
Dwarf Flesh(GW)
Elf Flesh(GW)




Recipe #7:

Tan(VG)
Dwarf Skin(VG)
Iraqi Sand(VM)




Recipe #8:

Flesh A (WF)
Flesh B (WF)
Flesh C (WF)




Recipe #9:

Brown Iron Oxide(DC)
Caucasian Flesh(DC)
Light Chocolate(DC)




Recipe #10:

2nd Shadow(AC)
2nd Base(AC)
2nd Light(AC)




Recipe #11:

1st Shadow(AC)
1st Base(AC)
1st Light(AC)




Recipe #12:

Saddle Brown(VM)
Cork Brown(VM)
Basic Skintone(VM)
Though the figure changed here from stage 1 to stage 2, the paints used were the same.




This is by no means an exhaustive list, just some of the common recipes I came across in asking around from a number of painters I know- primarily in the Steve Dean chat room. If this is seen as a useful tool for people out there I may expand and add in African and Asian flesh tones too. Also, if you're a paint merchant, feel free to send samples and I'll post them up.Thanks to those that contributed recipes for this: Roy Duffy, John Mooney, Andy Taylor, Stephan Huber, Artmaster Studios, et al. If you told me a recipe and I've forgotten, I do apologize. Extra thanks to Tom Snodgrass for donating the figures to use as examples in this project! This article is free to distribute for non-commercial purposes with proper attribution of all content and images:Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs2.5 License