Large areas of skin.

If you are using oils, you can blend your highlights and shadows. I'd start with a base coat of your green that you will be using for your skintone using acrylics. Once this has dired and cured you can do oyur highlights by matching your base coat and adding some yellow and white to create your highlights. Blend these verticaly into your base coat. Then you can do your shadows and blend these. You can darken your green by agan matching your base coat and adding a blue to darken your green. (A little goes a long way) A soft brush dipped in thinner and then wiped on a rag or paper towel a few times to make it almost dry will give you a nice even blend. Lightly make your blends and take your time without rushing it and they will be smooth transitions, you can make the adjustments to suit your taste as you progress.

If you are going to use acrylics.... after your base coat, make a wash of a lighter color. Here you will make feathered or layerd blends. Like a topographical map, you will lay color on from dark to light for your highlights and do the opposite for your shadow. A lighter shadow shade to a darker shade. The layering will be done with successive layers of this thinned paint and that will hep you with the smoother transitions. To lessen any hard transitions of color, you can make a very dilluted wash of your base coat and go over the whole area. This will even out the transitions a little and make for smoother modeling of color.

By placing your figure under a light source, after your base coat is applied, you can see how the light falls on it and where the areas of highlight are in realtion to the shadow.

Good luck.

Another technique that works really well with oils is called wet-on-wet. With this technique you first cover the "flesh" areas with the middle shade that you want (say, in this case, medium green) with unthinned oil paint. When you do this you want to spread the pigment around so it is a very thin layer (like a stain). You then take a clean, dry brush and brush over the entire painted area to lift off all of the excess oil paint that you can. After that you put in dots of a lighter oil paint (maybe Naples Yellow in this case) onto the highlighted areas (make the dots small: it's easier to add more paint if needed than it is to take too much paint off). Using a clean and dry soft bristle brush with a rounded tip of whatever size is useful according to what you are painting you stiple these dots of light color into the base stain. Move the brush up and down toward the surface, don't drag it sideways. If you need the highlights to be lighter just repeat the process until it looks the way you want it. After the oils dry (24 to 48 hours) you can apply the dark shadow colors where they would appear (again using small amounts of unthinned oil paints). After you have these colors in place, use a larger soft brush loaded with thinner (my favorite for this is Turpenoid) and touch the brush to the shadow areas and let the pigment flow into the recesses. You can use another clean , dry brush to pull off any excess pigment. It sounds complicated, but it is actually a very easy process and the results are quite amazing. Unfortunately, this technique only works with oils (at least to my knowledge). Hopefully this will help anyone with this kind of a problem. It definetely gives you a better looking result than dry brushing does. Chuck

Thanks for the tips.
Just for the record, I am using Acrylics, really cheap ones at that. They work good and if you mess up, it isn't that big a deal at 44-cents a bottle.

Like I said before, this is only the third figure I've done. The other two were Michael Myers and Curly. I haven't really gotten a grasp on the washes yet though.
Should you seal the model before doing the wash or just let it dry really well? Also, if I'm doing a wash on, say a tan color that is supposed to be fabric, should I do the wash in a darker shade of the same color or use a black wash? I think that is where the confusion is getting to me.

One other thing on the wash. Should the wash be done with the model in the upright position and then again upside down?

Thanks and

Later,
Zappa1

Rather than doing a wash on a large scale figure you might want to developed real shading and highlighting skills. However, using "really cheap" paints may be a problem. Acrylics are hard to use as a wash due tot the surface tension of water. Cheap paint will have much coarser pigments which will negatively affect the look of your wash as well. Washes are particulary effective where you have sharp deliniations, such as panel lines in vehicles or closely set folds or at the edge of pockets, hemlines and around belts/straps, etc on figures. I wouldn't use black on tan, but a darker shade of the base color. Further, your wash should be applied judiciously where sharp edges meet. This will allow capilarry action to pull the paint along, even against gravity.

Thanks for the tips again.

On the subject of the cheap paint: I tried them out on the first figure I did and found that they worked pretty well. Then again, I was building a tank and got a bottle of Tamiya and noticed that it worked much better in the airbrush. I guess I am just nervous about spending a lot of money on the higher quality paints and then wasting all of it because I don't know what I'm doing. What is the best sight for some instructions using oils versus acrylics that has some detailed pictures or even some good books on the subject? Again, thanks for the advice.

Later,
Zappa1

If you prefer acrylics, go to http://www.acrylicosvallejo.com/ and choose English. Click on "Model Color" from the drop down menu and scroll to the bottom of the page for the tutorial on this (and Andrea paint.) Online sources include
http://www.milminwh.com
http://www.sentinelminiatures.com
http://www.squadron.com.
Tamiya is not a good paint for figures since it does not brush on well, but if you are skilled with an airbrush, you could use this on a large scale figure for highlights and shadows, if you are willing to mix enough of the specific shade you need from T's limited palette. .