Dark Eldar Face Tutorial

In this tutorial i will show a quick and effective way to paint Dark eldar face

So first things first
Here is a little black and white photo showing where the higlights and shades will be

And here is black and white photo of finished head for comparison

So main points of highlights are nose, cheek bones eyebrow and chin. Eldar have very sharp faces so we can make strong contrast and sharp lines to reflect this.

So lets get started. We spray the head using chaos black spray.

Then we undercoat the whole face using mix of 1/3 mix of bestial brown an elf flesh. Make paint quite dense and apply it in in even layers until achieving strong base color ( this may require one or more layers pending on how diluted your paint was), this is the most important part of painting so don't be hasty. There is no need to be extra precise if u paint over eyes it ok we can fix that later.

Second step is applying shades this process may take 3-6 layers of glazing
We are using scorched brown diluted 1/3 with water and applying shades directly under cheek bones into the eye sockets and in the upper parts of the forehead

We consequently add more black to the mix building even deeper shading ( remember we are building strong contrast so strongest shades will be directly below strongest highlights)

Next step is building our highlights we start with applying mix of elf flesh and komando khaki 1/1 on to all areas that we want to build highlights on leaving the base color in recesses

Then we add more white to the mix building the highlights towards the points mentioned at the beginning, making it almost pure white at the edges of eyebrows, tip of the nose and cheekbones so that the white line lays directly above darkest shades.

Next step is adding some life to the face to do this we apply 3 glazes over the cheek bones and nose
we do first glaze using scab red gently washing to leave only small amount of pigment to just add that color to the prev painted area in transparent way.
Next we use liche purple over smaller area again in the way we used last glaze.
Final glaze is made using hawk turquoise this color we glazed in the mid tones to give him colder look.

Final stage is applying thin white lines on eyebrows cheek bones and nose and chin to give the face a little pop out as face is kind of a point of focus to the miniature at this stage we also paint eyes, its done by first undercoating them with black then painting eyes using pure white and fine brush and finally pupils using black and carefully placing dots (there is no real method on how to paint eyes, u just need a steady hand and a good pointy brush ah and a lot of practice)

Hope You like my tutorial and sorry for bad quality of the pics ... still don't have right photo gear to do this properly.