Preparing the parts
As I said earlier painting skin tones is not one of my better skills so I always, if I can, get a figure with minimal exposed flesh, in this case just the face as the hands will be gloved. For ease of painting I have mounted the torso and head on cocktail sticks which can be pushed into high density foam board whilst the parts dry.
Spray base colours
First stage of the painting is to spray the base colours, in this case Gunze Flesh for the head and Medium Sea Grey for the body. If you are spraying a Flesh base it is always a good idea to use a white primer, I use Tamiya Fine White Primer as this gives a lighter flesh tone to start with (apologises for the poor focus on the head but you can get the basic idea).
Shadow effect
Next you need to create a shadow effect. This is easy to do. Using a flat stiffish brush dry-brush a lighter shade of the base colour all over the figure. I like to use Vallejo model colour as it has a very good colour density and brush paints really well.
Painting detail – head
Now it’s back to the head and painting the detail. Again I try to use Vallejo paints and a good source of quality brushes is Games Workshop who do a standard brush, a dry-brushing brush and a detail brush. Like the earlier step, dry-brush a lighter tone over the base colour to create highlights and shadow.