How do I paint eyes and faces on a miniature?

A face at this scale is a few millimetres across, and the eye of anyone looking at the model goes straight to it. It is also the area where the sculpted detail is finest and where thick paint does the most damage. It is worth painting a spare head or two purely to practise, because the sequence matters more than the steadiness of your hand.

What you'll need

• A fine brush with a genuine point — a size 0 or 1 is fine
• Skin tone, a shade, and a lighter mix for highlights
• Off-white, black or dark brown, and a light blue or brown for irises
• A good light and something to steady both hands on

Step by step

1. Base coat the skin thin and even.Two or three thin coats of the mid skin tone. A single thick coat fills the eye sockets, the lips and the corners of the mouth, and once those are gone nothing else in this sequence works.
2. Shade the recesses.A brown or flesh-toned wash, applied into the eye sockets, under the nose, along the sides of the nose, under the lip and under the jaw. Keep it out of the middle of the cheeks and the forehead.
3. Paint the eyes before the final highlights.This is the ordering trick that makes faces achievable. Painting eyes last means every slip damages finished skin. Painting them now means you can tidy the socket with skin tone afterwards and the repair is invisible.
4. Fill the eye socket with a dark tone first.Black or a very dark brown across the whole eye area. This gives you a defined shape to work back into, and if the eyes go wrong at any later point you can return to this and start again.
5. Put in two small marks of off-white, not pure white.Pure white eyes at this scale read as staring and unnatural, because a real eye white in shadow is a light grey. A pale grey or bone tone reads far better. Two tiny horizontal marks, leaving dark at the top and both corners.
6. Place the pupil deliberately off-centre.A dark dot or vertical line towards one side of each eye white, in the same direction on both. A pupil centred in the middle of the white on both sides produces the wide-eyed stare that is the characteristic failed miniature eye.
7. Tidy the socket with skin tone.Clean up the outline of the eye with the base skin colour on a fine brush. This is where the eye actually gets its final shape, and it is why painting eyes before the highlights matters.
8. Highlight the raised areas of the face.Brow ridge, bridge and tip of the nose, cheekbones, the front of the chin, the upper lip. Progressively lighter and progressively smaller. These are the parts of a face that catch light, and getting them right does more than the eyes do.
9. Finish with the lips and any stubble or detail.A slightly redder or darker tone on the lower lip. A very thin grey-blue glaze over the jaw for stubble. Both are subtle and both are the last thing on.

Tips

• Steady both hands against something and against each other, and rest your wrists on the desk. Almost nobody can hold a free hand steady enough for a two-millimetre eye, and almost everybody can do it braced.
• If a face fights you, go back to the dark socket and start the eyes again. It costs two minutes and it is far better than three increasingly desperate attempts on top of each other.
• At tabletop distance a suggestion of an eye reads better than a detailed one. On a rank-and-file model, a dark socket with a hint of light in it is often the right level of detail.

Common mistakes

• Painting the eyes last — Every slip lands on finished, highlighted skin and shows as a patch. Doing eyes early means the skin work that follows tidies them for free.
• Using pure white for the eye whites — It is far brighter than a real eye at any scale and produces a fixed, alarming stare. Off-white or a light grey looks like an eye.
• Centring the pupil in each eye — It is symmetrical and lifeless, and any tiny error in placement makes the figure look cross-eyed. Looking slightly to one side is both more natural and far more forgiving.
• Making the eyes too large — The instinct is to make them big enough to see. Oversized eyes read as cartoonish and, worse, they push the eyelid and brow shapes out of the way, which is where the character of a face actually comes from.

If it doesn't work

Questions people ask