If you need practice painting figures, then go to Walmart and buy a bag of those little toy soldiers. You probably won't ever use them in a dio because they're so poorly molded, but you could get some valuable and cheap practice.

I completely disagree with you Samuel.
I say get the best possible figures you can find / afford and use those. Clean the figures with whatever cleaning agent your paint medium requires and start over.

As the saying goes "You cannot make a silk purse from a sow's ear"

I have to agree with AndyD, I recently started painting figures and i bought some of the best you can get.. on ebay. sometimes you can find kits of very good quality (hornet for example) for a few dollars/euros, so i got me a set of verlinden with 25 heads for only 5 euro. 10 of those are contemporary soldier heads, so i can't use them in my wwii dio's. I took one of those for my first test using this tutorial :

https://hfmodeling.kitmaker.net/forums/70682&page=1

I ended up with these results:

first head

second head - came from a hornet set i bought for my ongoing Firefly VC diorama, 5 heads of UK tankers

third head - from the same hornet set. this one will end up on my tank commander.


I was very surprised to see that only after 3 tries i got a very satisfying result. if the quality of the heads would have been mediocre i wouldn't have been able to get this kind of detail and practice.

each head took me about 5 hours to complete (i painted each in 1 go). before i used this method i only painted 1 head. The third head i posted here is the 4th head i ever painted in my life. so there's hope for everyone only patience and practice is needed for this.

Hey, Jody.
I use Vallejo and Andrea and paint in the shadows and highlights. At a seminar last fall, Marion Ball discussed how she blends these in using a very thin version of the base paint over the color. I've tried to emulate this and it works quite well. The thinned base has less intensity that the straight base and brings the tones together more. I finish mine with an airbrushed layer of Dullcoat which further toens down the colors.

Thanks AJlaFleche for the help. I'll probably try that.

BTW I didn't know this would spark such a huge disagreement. There are more crazy things out there, AndyD. I've heard people paint the faces on pennies! And for those of us that are just starting and have never painted a full figure (like me), it is certainly better to practice on something cheap, as we won't be using them in models.

Anyway, I don't want to start a big argument.

Happy modeling!

If there is one thing (among many, many) I cannot do, it is paint the face of a figure....however, Steven's efforts are encouraging. Nice work by the way especially the figure with his mouth open. The eyes came out very well also.
thanks
DJ

I had a lot of trouble with heads. Now I paint a flesh basecoat, use pastels to highlight and lowlight, light pink for lips, and then mist with clear flat. I use almost the same technique with hair. Use a dark basecoat, highlight with lighter shades, then mist with clear flat. The tones are very realistic and subtle. Eyes are still a little beyond my skills though.