Hi Chester,
Thanks for the compliments, I'm pretty happy with how the figure turned out. I was really intimidated when I thought about painting figures as well. But after alot of reading, practicing and sitting down and thinking about it, it was really not that hard.
Like I said, I used Vallejo acrylics for all my figure painting. Most people swear by using oils for the skin but I like using the layering and feathering technique with the acrylics (and the vallejos are the best for this). Basically what this means is, for whatever part of the figure you are painting (whether it's the uniform, the face, the hands etc), you need to have 3 colours for each section - a middle tone, a lghter tone (for highlights) and a darker tone (for shadows). It's not always best to just add white and black to your middle tone for the lighter and darker either. Sometimes you have to select complimentry colours. For example, an olive drag uniform may be mixed with a dark blue or black for the shadows, and mixed with a light yellow/green or beige for the highlights - it just takes some experimenting.
Anyway, when you have your three colours, start with an overall base colour of the middle tone you selected. With Vallejos I thin this with distilled water to a ratio of 1:1 and do about 2-3 coats and let this dry overnight. Next add a little bit of your light colour to your middle tone colour to start lightening it (for example - olive green to beige at a ratio of 2:1), and thin it more than the base colour (paint to water 1:3). Put you brush in the mixture but then unload your brush before painting. To do this, get a lint free cloth and lightly press the side of your brush to the cloth, this will unload most of the paint from your brush and will stop the paint flowing all over your figure with capillary action. With that done, with your lighter colour, go over all the raised areas of the section you are painting and highlight it with the light colour. After this is done, let dry for about 15minutes, then add more light colour to your base colour (base to light colour ratio 1:1), thin to proper consistency and repeat the previous step by highlighting raised areas with a thinner brush stroke than before so you can still see some of the previous highlight underneath. Continue to do this 2 more times, each time making the paint mixture lighter and lighter.
After this is done, leave overnight to dry and come back the next day and do the exact same thing, but now with the darker colours for shadow and paint the shadow colour in all the creases, each time making the colour darker and darker - thinner and thinner.
After you have done your highlights and shadows and left overnight to dry. The final step I do is get a very thinned down version of the middle base colour (around 1:5 paint to water) and do a light coat over the entire area (trying to keep away from the extreme raised areas and extreme creases). This just helps to blend all the shades together.
One thing to keep in mind with the face is that you can use a thinned down layer of dark blue and your skintone base colour for stuble or 5 o'clock shadow, and you can use a mixture with a very small amount of crimson for slighly rosey cheeks or the lower lip. And if you want to do the eyes - never have your figure looking straight ahead (you will never get it right), have them looking slightly off centre, and you can use a very small dot of brown for the pupil, and a small dot of your skin highlight colour (never use white - it's too bright) on just one side of the pupil (the both side on both eyes eg. if his looking to the right, put the light dot on the left side of each pupil).
It sounds complicated, but it's not. Once you have done your base colour, you can do each sections highlights and shadows in about 1/2 hour each. Hope this helps, but it will probably only confuse, I know I always get confussed when someone tries to explane their processes to me.
Adam.