Kolbeh's Workshop

ninthemage replied to your post: @thegentlemansguide yikes! I’ve been pretty…

I’ve been looking for ways to paint Native American and Arabic/Indian tones to expand my roster and there’s shockingly little outside of others asking the same question. Tabletop nerds have this massive blindspot when it comes to representing people of colour. Nothing makes me cringe more when I’m teaching as customer to paint, and when I ask them what skin they wanna paint their space mans I get a “Errrr normal skin mate”.

Oh god that’s the worst. “Normal,” jesus, ugh.

General guideline: For browns/red-brown skin tones, wash with Reikland Fleshshade. For golden/pale olive skin tones, wash with Seraphim Sepia. For dark olive skin tones, wash with Agrax Earthshade. You can fudge this, obviously, or switch it up to get some variation- say you painted a squad of Tallarn to be vaguely ‘Arabic’ looking but varied the washes and highlighting to represent some diversity within the general ethnic group.

For Native American, you’ve got some range obviously so mix with darker and lighter skin tones until you get the effect you want but I’ve had decent results getting the sort of standard/assumed red-brown of great plains peoples by mixing a good strong rust orange/red brown (GW’s Skrag Brown works well for this) with my darkest tan flesh triad paint, “Tanned Shadow” in about a 2:3 ratio. Gives it a much stronger ruddy undertone while still resembling an actual human skin color. Wash with Reikland Fleshshade.

Inuit, native Siberians, and more northern Native Americans like Tlingit I recommend using Golden Skin as the base, washing with Seraphim Sepia, and highlighting with Golden Highlight. You can even use Golden Highlight as the base if you want them more pale- this also works well for pale east Asian folks as you can imagine.

There’s a good bit of range across the Arabic-speaking world and India too of course but here are two colors that should read appropriately at a glance- you can add more or less shading/highlighting for some range.

Arabic (also what I use for Mediterranean): Tanned Highlight base, wash with Agrax Earthshade for a darker ‘under color,’ highlight raised areas with Tanned Highlight again

Northern Indian: Golden Shadow + Tanned Flesh or Tanned Highlight in a 1:1 ratio as the base color, wash with Agrax Earthshade, highlight usually with Tanned Highlight.

Southern Indian: Golden Shadow + Dark Highlight in a 1:1 ratio (can mix it up by swapping Tannned Shadow for Dark Highlight for a medium between this and the above) for the base, wash with Agrax Earthshade, highlight with your non-golden skin tone.

To provide some examples, here are some pictures for the curious. I’m pretty happy with how they turned out:

Meanwhile in these four armies there isn’t a SINGLE female model. Not one.

And don’t even try to argue that there could be women underneath that armour. Because they’re obviously sculpted as male. You can’t argue that.