Painting Creepy Cartoonish Skin

Transcript

Cutting right to the chase. I’ve got Scale Color light skin on the palette, a mix of purples from yesterday—Scale Color purple and violet—and our boy is looking pretty bright after the fun from yesterday. There’s still a big difference between the shadows and the brights, which is what we’re going for. All the textures we sculpted are coming through intentionally.

Brush vs Airbrush

I could have done this purple workup with the airbrush in 10 minutes—probably with a better result if I’m being honest. But if I’m going to use a paintbrush, I should lean into the advantages of the brush and make it obvious.

Working Up the Skin

Using the peachy light skin color mixed with the midtone, I’m doing the same process as yesterday but hopefully for the final time. Taking it up several notches, then doing midtone glazes over everything again. It’s a little scary knowing how high this is going to push it.

On the belly, I’m being more careful with blending the shadows since so much of the eye is drawn there. Working the colors together, cleaning the brush so it has no pigment, and smoothing transitions. On the back, the shadow transitions looked too obviously layered—not a smooth enough transition—so I’m softening those while keeping the depth.

The Stippling Technique

This is effectively edge highlighting for skin. You load up the brush, drag it through the paint, swirl to get a tip, and make sure paint only comes halfway up the belly of the brush. Then you come in with stippling—lots of little dots and hash marks, being intentionally scratchy.

When you’re painting these, you’ll think they look a little strange. Nobody’s going to see that up close. And remember it’s going to dry way darker. But at tabletop level, this is the stuff that catches your eye and makes you go “wow, that’s a cool paint job.” If you had all day and all year, you could paint the whole model like this—a brush stroke at a time.

Naming the Model

I’ve been going back and forth on how to paint the monolith. I found a busted, cracked rock in my collection—a pale, marbled yellow-green and gray stone. That color combo would be pretty sick. I’ve been trying to think of a name for him. I was calling him the Monolith Bearer, but that didn’t seem right.

His name is officially the Keeper of the Pale Stone. He doesn’t bear it, he doesn’t use it—he just keeps it on his back and carries it around for the actual Bearer of the Pale Stone, the one who actually uses it. That’ll be my next sculpting project. Tomorrow I’m going to try hand-painting marble, something I’ve never attempted before.

Results

After letting everything dry, I’m really happy with how it turned out. Going to revisit the face mask now to add more darkness and shadows to match the depth on the rest of the body. Tomorrow: hands, toenails, face mask revisit, probably the chain too. Then we’ll tackle the marble.

The body is from Miscast—great model. I can cast and sell them: $20 including shipping in the US. You get the crystal and the body, plus the head from Miscast.

You don’t have to know what you’re doing to make art. You just got to do it.