One project nearly every miniature painter needs to tackle at some point is painting human/elf/dwarf flesh. If you are new to the task, likely you'll ask your friends or aquaintences online what recipes they use, and for nearly everyone you ask, you may get a different answer. With miniature painting's broad online presance, many time these folks who answer you back may not be local to you, and they may not have examples of how their recipes look available online. If you are an experienced painter with a favorite recipe or two of your own, the desire to branch out, create variety in your miniatures collection, or just try for something different, can be beset by the same difficulties. Even looking at the pictures of the bottles online or in your local store doesn't really give you an idea of what they may look like all mixed and blended together on your favortie miniature.


In an effort to give people a bit more information on which to make these decisions I have collected a number of flesh recipes using some of the most commonly used and widely available paint brands, and present them here for your reference. Please note this is not intended to be a HowTo on techniques for painting flesh. There are many tutorials out there that do that topic justice better than I could. I assume for the most part that you have your own techniques worked out; This is merely for a visual reference on the way colors look together. If you're a serious blender, or a stripe/block painter, you should be able to extrapolate how things will look using your method from my examples.

While I have provided 4 pictures of each recipe, there may be more than 4 layers present. I tried to paint these at a consistent table-top quality, which for me means that I'll usually mix the base and the main color a couple times in different proportions, so between Color 1 and Color 2 there might actually be 3 or 4 layers instead of just 2. That is just my style of painting. The pictures however are the milestones, or keyframes if you like, of where things reached the color of the next bottle.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, just some of the common recipes I came across in asking around from a number of painters I know- primarily in the Steve Dean chat room. If this is seen as a useful tool for people out there I may expand and add in african and asian flesh tones too. Also, if you're a paint merchant, feel free to send samples and I'll post them up.

Thanks to those that contributed recipes for this: Roy Duffy, John Mooney, Andy Taylor, Stephan Huber, Artmaster Studios, et al. If you told me a recipe and I've forgotten, I do apologize. Extra thanks to Tom Snodgrass for donating the figures to use as examples in this project!