The Army Painter Skin Tones Paint Set - Hands On Review!

I am forever trying to complicate things. Possibly the one area where this isn't the case is when it comes to painting; wherever I can avoid it, I won't mix colours and will instead prefer to use paint straight from the pot. Especially across painting a large army project, I like the certainty that comes of using a single colour rather than having to match a mixed colour (or, heavens forbid, remember how the hell I made it in the first place). The Army Painter's new Skin Tone Paint Set is a set of colours made to more easily replicate the vast variety of skin tones seen in our world - and beyond, in some cases! - to use on our miniatures, and as soon as it was available for pre-order I jumped on the opportunity.

The box says it '...allows you to create highly realistic skin tones on your miniatures.' Surely that's true of any paint range, if you don't mind a little mixing? Where this range of new paints excels is in taking some of the guess work out of that with a range which work brilliantly as base colours with a shade applied over them, how The Army Painter usually suggests their paints be used. A base colour, an acrylic ink wash, then a highlight. Easy. Does the new paint set live up to its ambition? Do they work? Well, yes. Quite well, actually! There are one or two minor quirks to address, but they're really more based on my own wish for what the set might have been rather than what The Army Painter have produced, and on the whole the skin tone range is likely to be extremely useful in any painter's arsenal.

So let's look at some examples of these paints in use!

I printed up The Barbarian from Claudio Casini since I figured there's nowhere better to test skin tone paints than a huge, barely-clothed barbarian, right? I did find it a little funny to straight away be painting another fair-skinned buff dude when the paint set proudly advertises being able to paint a wide variety of skin tones, but under the circumstances it seemed most useful to paint something I was familiar with and first get a feel for how the paints actually behaved.

The short answer: extremely well. I have the entire range of Army Painter Warpaints already, and while I quite enjoy using them, there's no denying that some of the colours require more than a little elbow grease to mix properly before the first time you use them. Even then, some colours will need even more before each use, and the inclusion of mixing balls in the Skin Tones Paint Set seemed a useful addition. I decided I'd give the bottles a shake first and use the paint as it came out rather than adding the mixing balls straight away in order to see if any of them were particularly difficult to mix or separated between uses, and I was extremely surprised to discover that after putting out the first couple of drops of medium at the top of the bottle and giving them a shake, they were smooth and well-mixed.

The paints have that same slightly creamy consistency of other Army Painter acrylics, and the colours were extremely smooth once they'd been squeezed on to the palette. I used only a tiny bit of water mixed in to help with the flow, and coverage was good over a Skeleton Bone primer spray. This figure was painted with a base coat of Dorado Flesh (a new favourite), shaded with the Strong Skin Wash, then layered with Kobold Skin from the existing paint range, with a final highlight of Kobold Skin mixed with a tiny spot of Pearl Pigment Toner from the new set.

Something else I really like about the new range is that it dovetails neatly with the existing Warpaints. Tanned Flesh, Barbarian Flesh and others neatly complement the skin tones, and I found a couple of times I was able to turn to paints I already had rather than mixing them to achieve highlights. Though, in turn, mixing did give me much better results to get more subtle gradients in colour as evidenced with these two spare Space Marine heads who gave gloriously to the cause of paint testing:

Onyx Skin shaded with Dark Skin Wash, highlighted with a mix of Onyx Skin and Tiger's Eye Skin.

Amber Skin shaded with Soft Skin Wash, higlighted with a mix of Amber Skin and Pearl Pigment Toner.

Now, where I wish I'd taken my own advice and mixed some of these highlights comes with the following example. I decided I'd instead stick to using purely bottled colours and washes, and as an end result the colour progression came out looking much more stark and pronounced than I'd have liked ordinarily. It's not bad, per se, but it's not quite what I was looking for. Live and learn, though! The whole point was to experiment and I'm glad for the experience. 

This version of The Barbarian (affectionately calling them Co-not and Grog-not) started from a Leather Brown Primer, with Tiger's Eye Skin, a Strong Skin Wash, then Jasper Skin, and a final highlight of Tanned Flesh from the existing range of Warpaints. This is where I wish I'd gone back with Tiger's Eye Skin after the wash step to soften that transition of colour, and though he's come out well enough, I think the end result could have looked a bit nicer and still without having to mix anything. Otherwise, maybe a little mix of Tiger's Eye and Jasper instead of pure Jasper Skin as the layering step might have looked better, perhaps.

As with the first figure, only the skin here is highlighted. Everything else was given a single flat basecoat of a relevant colour and then a shade, with the exception of the hair which got a light grey drybrush to make it stand out a little. 

Something I'd suggest to bear in mind while working with these washes in particular is that just as with the Strong, Soft and Dark Tone acrylic washes, they will dry with a fairly prominent shine and leave it a little difficult to see what you're doing. After laying down the shade on this guy, I had to come back and hit it with a matt varnish spray so I could keep working on him since it was glossy enough I could scarcely tell what the colours were doing - the end result will look fine, of course, but it pays to know ahead of time what those washes might do while you're using them so you aren't utterly disheartened to see your hard work 'ruined' by that high shine! Just a matt varnish of your choice and you'll be sorted.

In conclusion, there's plenty more to be learned and discovered as I carry on experimenting with these and keep trying new things. So far they're excellent paints and I'm very much looking forward to carrying on using them, rather than pushing them to the back of the paint rack where I might stumble on to them occasionally. I'm also really a fan of using those skin washes in different ways - Strong Skin Wash works surprisingly well as a wash over something like Citadel's Retributor Armour, giving a deep, warm brass colour. There's a lot of fun to be had in playing around with these, and I'm going to try my hand at a couple more barbarians to see what else I can discover.

Of final note, the Skin Tones Paint Set also includes a bottle of Warpaint Mixing Medium and four empty mixing bottles as well as 20 stainless steel agitator balls, so if you're of a mind to make your own mixes in larger quantity, you'll be well served with the box. Definitely worth the investment if you're planning to paint a variety of different skin tones, with some surprises in there you might find useful to supplement or even replace some of what you're currently using. Cadian Fleshtone can go right out the window if you've got Dorado Skin to hand!