Painting a flayed skin cloak

[Ovidius Incertus]

I want to convert a Night Lords character and intend to use the patchwork flayed skin cloak from the new Dark Eldar Archon mini.  The cloak is thin enough to be heat formed to fit a Space Marine (I've bent the cloak before with this model, so it should work for my purposes).

 

It's a patchwork cloak (and even has a face built into it, so excellent) and I'd like to largely paint it up like the box art on the DE Archon, which I won't display because xenos.

 

So what are some colors I should use?  I'm not averse to mixing in some non-human patches (maybe some Ork skin or Tau?), but don't really know what colors to use to differentiate the patches and make some look newer, some older, different skintones, etc.

 

Suggestions?

[Major_Gilbear]

Well, this comes down to two main aspects I think: what flesh colours to use for painting flesh, and how to vary the colours.

 

The first (what colours to paint flesh) is reasonably personal. I say this, as different people like different tones, different shades, different ways of building up the colour, and even working with different paints (as they may have particular properties that are desirable).

 

I use Reaper paints for most tones of Caucasian flesh. Specifically, their "Medium Skin Tone Triad", which consists of Tanned Shadow, Tanned Skin, and Tanned Highlight. These are quite thick but thin down very well, and they are also very matte. I like them because they can cover dark colours very well, and have a well-balanced Caucasian flesh tone. A quick note on this: you are looking for colours that basically look like ladies' makeup/concealer! These colours are not necessarily paints which have "flesh" in their name, as in my experience many manufacturers often make these far too yellow/orange.

 

The second item to address is the variation in colour. I'll be honest here, I find it easiest to paint it all one tone of pale flesh, and the use some very thin glazes of brown (add in tiny amounts of greens, blues, and purples to the brown to get different tones of brown) to pick out certain panels with. This keeps it easy (as I only have to really paint/highlight one colour, and I can get the highlights to look smooth across the whole cape rather than doing each little rectangle individually). An alternative is to add these colours to your base flesh tone and then highlight each one individually before applying a light uniform wash across the whole cape to tie the different parts together.

 

Finally, I would make a few general observations:

 

- You normally want a contrasting colour for feature elements like a cloak of skins. As you say, a pale tone contrasts well with the dark blue Night Lord armour.

 

- You want some variation in the skin tones, but this needs to be very subtle. Too much variation, and it looks like a knitted bed quilt!

 

- Sometimes, some things need to be painted in unrealistic or exaggerated tones/colours in order to for the element to be "read" correctly by the observer. Thus painting the skin cloak in purple or green Zombie-like tones might seem like a reasonable idea, but it's then not very obvious to the viewer what it's supposed to be made of; on the other hand making it flesh-toned leaves it clear to the view that this is a cape of flesh!

 

- The cape (a bit like painting hair) is a single item, even if it has texture or is made up of smaller modules. If you paint it as a whole, it will look like a cape; if you paint and highlight each square separately, you end up obscuring the overall shape and volume of the element. In effect, by doing each square separately, you are breaking up the overall shape of the item just like camo does.