if you paint Miniatures you probably dread painting those itty bitty tiny faces and I did too especially considering how incredibly detailed Warhammer faces are these days but I finally figured out how to make painting the face the most enjoyable part of the painting process but how fast can it be done and still look good let's find [Music] out isn't it satisfying when you get those little aha moments in your miniature painting where you finally figured something out that's been eluding you for a while I know when I get those moments I like to do two things first I like to tell you guys about it in a video which is why we're here today and two I like to take that new knowledge and narrow it down to what's most important so I can make the biggest impact on my Miniatures in the shortest amount of time and I finally think I've unlocked those tricks for painting faces I I know if you can tell or not but I'm pretty excited about this so let's walk through the steps I use to paint Warhammer faces and see how quickly we can do it we'll paint three Space Marine heads one in an hour one in 30 minutes and one in 10 minutes let's start with the face I'm going to spend a full 60 Minutes on and before we dig too deep into all the steps I need to talk to you about the colors I'll be using six different paints for this skin and I know that seems like a lot especially since we'll be mixing some of these together along the way to create half steps in color transitions as well but it's not nearly as complex as it looks I promise to start we only need a darker skin color and a mid-tone skin color I'm using Barbarian Bron and Dwarven skin from the two Thin coats paint range oh if you wanted to pick up any painting supplies or models check out my links down in the video description and those help support the channel and you get an additional 10% off your entire order with Michigan toy soldier and they've got the biggest inventory in North America the lower half half of the face is painted with the darker color and the upper half starting at the nose and top of the cheekbones is painted with a 50/50 mix of the dark and the mid-tone skin colors this gives us the perfect starting position of a natural light and Shadow over an oval-shaped face while still keeping the warmth even in the shadow regions now if you're painting a man's face you can sell that rough 5:00 shadow by mixing in a little bit of dark desaturated blue into the dark skin tone and hit the dark darker areas of the lower parts of the face like the underside of the cheekbones below the nose and an Endy creases in folds now even if you don't want to put a beard on your miniature or you're painting a female face a very thin glaze of a desaturated dark blue down in the lower regions of the face will go a long ways in selling that natural look of human skin it gives you a depth of color that you'll never receive from just a skin tone out of a bottle I then thin down my black red to a very thin glaze with just water water and I add that to the cheeks and the lower lips for the same reason I'm building color depth and smoothing out the transition from the upper half of the face to the darker lower [Music] half once I've used those thin paints to create some realism in the skin tone I'm going to now start highlighting with that I'm doing pure Dwarven flesh and now that I've come to highlighting I want to be sure to mix my paint 50/50 with water so no single brush stroke makes a harsh jump in brightness one thing that's really up my game for painting faces in addition to a very tiny paintbrush is really taking a good look at pictures of the human face to understand how light and Shadow works on our skin at a basic level anything that's higher up on the oval shape of a human head as well as anything that's protruding rooting from that oval shape should be brighter on its upward-facing surface the prime examples of this are the brow line the nose the cheeks and the lips but there's a lot more subtle skin folds that we shouldn't ignore as those are what really bring our faces to life when we paint them a prime example of this is that piece of face meat that runs where the bridge of your nose meets the inside of your eye and this skin runs around your upper lip and down to your chin that muscle is called the nasol labial fold that sounds like a dirty term but knowing the dirty name of this muscle isn't what's important what's important is that you remember to paint it now here's where I used to call my face paint jobs complete but we have to remember that human skin is very reflective especially the face because it's naturally more oily than the rest of the skin on our body so I'm going to push myself by going brighter mixing in some sunny skin tone to my Dwarven flesh I'm working in smaller and smaller areas focusing on the upper half of the face specifically I'm punching up the brightness over a few thin layers now I'm never going to work up to a pure sunny skin tone that's much too vibrant in Orange to look like human skin so to keep a bit of that Dwarven flesh tone but go brighter I'm going to mix in some ice yellow to that [Music] mix [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh once I've built up that vibrancy I can work back into the Shadows a bit more glazing in the black red over the lips on the sides of the temple and the cheeks because I'm not pressed for time and I have a full hour here I can go back and forth between the shadows and highlights as many times as I want until I feel the model starts to look as good as it does in my head when painting hair I found it's very important to frame the face with a dark color where the hair meets the scalp even with light colored hair that point where the skin meets the hair will fall into Shadow and we want to make sure we keep it dark so we frame the face I want to make sure to have the hair lighter on the top and darker on the sides just like we did when painting the face because these areas would be the ones that would be closer to the Sun or our light source finish up all the metal stuff around his ears and neck I just paint them black and then I mix in a little bit of silver gray with that black and build up a little bit of definition across the edges and the areas that would catch a bit of light I then add some white to that grayish blue mix to give us a brighter highlight color that I can put on corners and edges that really show as a bit of shine and we can Define the little bits of details around the head with that we're actually finished just before our 1hour time limit is up so what I see here is that we can utilize all the depth of color and Nuance that the human face has and paint it at a 32 millim scale in under an hour and we can adapt our color choices to a wide variety of skin tones if we just choose the same steps we did here and alter our original base colors but I am a bit nervous on how much of that's going to be able to translate when I cut my time in half from 60 Minutes to 30 clothes why do we wear them to keep our Dingle bits warm obviously but today's sponsor into the am not only ensures that all of our bits are kept at the appropriate temperature but also ensures that we're devilishly stylish as well you may already know that into the am has been a sponsor of my channel for quite a while now and the reason why is pretty simple I am consistently impressed by the quality of their products and because of that I can be confident that you'll be equally impressed by the work of their skilled Artisans that craft each garment from the highest quality fabrics and eco-friendly inks the shirts won't stretch out or fade and the ink won't fade away bleed in the wash or crack and they're constantly releasing new designs so you'll always find something that speaks to you like this SI Reading Rainbow in space shirt so check out into the AM by clicking on my link below and be sure to see what awesome sales and bundles they have going on and since you're using my link you'll get 10% off your entire order a big thanks to IND the am for being that butterfly in the sky now let's get back to the video but one thing I've got going for me on this 30 minute paint job is that I started painting this face immediately after finishing the 1eh hour face so all of the steps and important things I needed to remember are fresh in my head and this is not an inconsequential data point in fact it expands Beyond further than just today's experiment when you paint Minis on a regular basis much of the fine mortar skills color interactions and subconscious painting skills are right there on the surface of your brain I don't know about you but when I take a few weeks away from miniature painting and come back that first miniature I paint is a little bit clunky and I'm sure you're the same way you're a little rusty it takes a little while to reintroduce yourself to the act of miniature painting until you finally get back into that Groove and because I was in my groove from painting that one hour face I am really right in it on this 30 minute face and as I'm working there are two things that I've noticed that I'm adapting first I'm simply moving faster because I'm in the groove and I'm not actively thinking about small decisions on where to put paint I don't have the time for that I simply have to keep moving and I'm following the basic shapes of the human face and second I'm not wasting time mixing paints as much and not creating that many transitions in layers that work my way up in brightness now that's not to say I'm not getting as bright and vibrant in this second paint job I absolutely want to get to that same level I'm just trying to get there faster another reason why I think these 30 minutes are going smoothly is this model has the coolest head of all three in my opinion all sorts of wrinkles and lines and open mouth and a scar across the forehead this means I don't have a lot of flat areas that I need to worry about smooth Blends I'm just focusing on making sure each area is of the appropriate brightness and that I've built it in that color depth with the glazes of the dark blue and black [Music] red at one point I felt like I got too bright too fast so all I did was take my base color Barbarian Brun and thinned it down with water to a glaze and I can slowly put that across those areas that are too bright to pull them back in and this is a little trick that I use all the time when I'm building up brightness on my models you can always glaze your midtone back over your highlights to pull those colors back together going too bright or too desaturated as your highlighting is always an easy thing to fix when I started working on the hair and the metal crap around his neck I realized I was almost out of time I just made sure to frame the face with darker colors and I then added a few Edge highlights to define the shapes of these surfaces and that's going to have to do for now look it down at the clock I did have a few seconds to spare so I grabbed that black red glaze and I push that towards the temples in the hairline to add a little bit more depth there before our time's up well beside the fact that I felt a little rushed about the hair and the ear muffs I'm kind of surprised about the 30-minute face comparing it to the 1hour version in some ways I think I like it better maybe it's just because I think the face is a cooler expression but there's still something amazing to learn here once we get the hang of how to use each color to bring up depth and brightness in the correct areas we don't actually need all that much time to execute now before we jump to the 10-minute face I think that if I practiced a 30 minute face every day for a couple of weeks I bet I could get a 10-minute face really pretty good but this will be my first try and let's see where it goes to start off I mixed in a bit of that dark blue we've been using into the darker skin tone that I'm going to use for the lower half of the face and I think maybe this will save me a step later but it just kind of looks like it pulls all the warmth out of that darker skin tone which isn't good but I really don't have any time to second guess myself and start over now I'm a bit frazzled at this point so I decide to make another shortcut and that's to jump straight to Dwarven skin on the forehead and nose knowing that I'm going to go brighter to those points anyway so we might as well start there and save some time now to me those two shortcuts we just took feels like they put me against the eightball I have those big jumps from Bright to dark and I need to pull them back together so I mix 50/50 Barbarian brwn and Dwarven flesh to redefine all of our midtones better I want to be sure I'm making all of those smaller shapes on the face pronounced before we move forward as soon as I feel like I've pulled it back where I want it just a little bit I got to jump to highlighting and spend some time with some dark blue mixed with our black red and put that around the eyes to really create some definition in all the small details around his eyes I realized that just mixing our shadow colors into our base colors does not do the trick so I worked my glazes back again using the dark blue across his shaved head and the black red across his cheeks at this point time is running out way too fast so I have to decide where to spend my last few minutes I think that boosting the highlights on the face is my best use of time so I rush to get those Final highlights on the face as time goes was over 10 minutes and I guess we're going to have to be done well he's not actually done his hair and his ear muffs aren't painted yet but the face looks okay and with that we have heads painted in 1 hour in 30 minutes and in 10 minutes and I know we still have the rest of the model to paint before we consider a paint job done but I find that if I get the head painted well and I think it looks cool I'm that much more excited to paint the rest of the model and conversely if I'm dreaded painting the face says I end up not painting as much as I probably should and I know I can already hear you barking in the comments about the fact that I didn't paint their eyes well I have a little conspiracy theory that Games Workshop specifically makes Space Marine faces with so much detail that give you no space to paint an eye so it just saves us from ever having to do that so unless I'm painting for a competition like golden demon I don't never bother painting a space marinees eyes and neither should you and after this experiment is all over the biggest thing I'm walking away away with is what can be accomplished in painting a face in just 30 minutes I don't think the jump from 30 minutes to 1 hour was that much of an improvement at all what do you think can you tell there's a big difference between 30 minutes and an hour let me know down in the comments and while you're down there why don't you let me know what you think of videos like this where I get a little bit more into the nitty-gritty on painting a specific thing a big thanks for those of you that share that feedback with me it really helps me understand what you like to see in videos and how I I can make that happen also a massive thank you for watching the video all the way to the end it really does mean a lot to me and thanks for subscribing to the channel as well maybe you picked up a ninj on shirt along the way maybe you used my links to buy some miniature goodies or maybe you've joined me over on the ninj on patreon your support and interest in this weird little miniature painting YouTube channel is a true inspiration I'll be back before you know it with another video and sometime between now and then make sure you find time in your day just lay the gray