Darren Latham - Lord of Blights Masterclass - Part 02: Painting the Skin

Here we are on to part 2 starting off with a black primed miniature we were to tackle the largest area of the miniature, the skin...

(This is a thumbnail of the original video, unfortunately no longer available as of 18/05/2020)

To say I was a little worried about trying to follow this series just looking at the thumbnail on the skin video would be an understatement. Just look at that blending, it's gorgeous!

Right off the starting post I hit my first bit of difficulty. Mr Latham paints with such extremely thinned paints it's mind boggling. It feels like painting everything with glazes. He said the first skin colour above might take 4-5 coats to get a solid colour, maybe more...

10... It took me 10 coats of extremely thin paint to get a solid base colour... Well it was done, now to move on to the next step.

Basically... You are told to cover everything bar the very deepest recesses with a new colour mix, because the previous colour is just used as the foundation for this one... Okay, done and moving on...

Now... New colour mix... Cover everything you've just done again, leaving only the deepest recesses, because the last colour is just the foundation to build up to this one... this was the point I started to question my life choices... :D

I took a breath, let go of my preconceptions and just decided to enjoy the process. Every new mix was really thinned down and glazed up more and more, very subtle to begin with.

I did start to have some problems with the paints breaking down and turning gritty at this level of dilution and had to keep playing with it to get it to just the right level to keep on glazing and highlighting up.

The very final highlight colour I was finding very problematic. No matter how I played with the dilution level, it was either too thick or thin/gritty and just kept breaking down. I've found I've had this problem with a lot of the very lightest white/off-white citadel paints. So at this point I made the executive decision to use a couple of drops of airbrush thinner in the mix. Problem solved, left a little satin sheen and I used a little Lahmian Medium to matte it down again.

The skin just suddenly started to come to life with the glazes of additional shading bringing everything together. Then the buboes and rent flesh was glazed and shaded and we reached the end of this video. The fatty layers beneath the skin and some blue areas were added to add some variety.

The following images are the skin stage complete.

I was really surprised how well it turned out, even after the little problems I had experienced and was really excited to move on to the next part of the series.

And that should be following shortly.

Until then, take care.