Corpse Hands

Step 9 In which we bring out his true colors...

This part is a bit arbitrary, as you will undoubtedly have your own idea of how you want to paint your own creation. I will, however, endeavor to show you how I accomplished my own painting.

Painting is an art. An accomplished master takes years and years to hone his skills. I, on the other hand, am not a master by any stretch of the imagination. But I have a few tricks in my bag. We will be working in layers, moving from the darkest colors to the lightest.

Start off by coating the entire arm, from fingertip to funny bone in the dark brown, making sure that all the little nooks and crannies are covered. Nothing more frustrating to think you're done, only to find a streak of white between the fingers that you missed! Let this layer dry. Depending on how heavy you ladled it on, might take an hour or a few. I leave a fan on it to accelerate the process. This is the "base coat". This is what will show through where you don't paint in the next steps.

The next coat is the "undercoat". Use a lighter brown, either straight up or by mixing the brown with a little yellow and/or white. You might add a little red, but be very careful of red. It takes very little of this color to start to saturate your mix and "pink"-ify it, which I, personally, don't like. With your brush, take some of the paint and tap off most of the color onto a rag or paper towels. With a light stroke, go over the arm. The idea here is to not slather the paint, but to caress the arm with the tips of the brush. It's not what's called "dry brushing" but its close. You should still see the darkest paint when you are done, but not a lot. Let dry.

Now we are on the last major painting step, highlighting. In this we will be dry brushing. I will explain in a minute.

The color here we want to use is closer to the final color you want. I am using white, with yellow mixed in, a touch of red and brown.

Now we dry brush. We do this by tapping only the very ends of the bristles into the paint and tapping almost all of it off onto our rag or paper towel. You want just the barest hint of paint on the brush. Start brushing the piece with the brush. You should notice that only the highest parts of the skin texture will pick up the paint. That's what you want. Avoid any this of brush strokes. If you get a streak of color, immediately start brushing the area in the sideways direction, to smear it out. Once done, you might change your color slightly and go over it again, hitting certain areas you think need special attention. It's not unusual to dry brush with multiple colors (adding a little white, or yellow, etc). Skin tone is not flat (or monochromatic) so don't be afraid to experiment.

If you finish and don't quite like the results, you can always go back what you did on the undercoat and start over from that point, covering your highlighting.

What happens if you get the paint nice, but slightly the wrong hue? Once thing you can do is a wash. A wash, in many ways, is the opposite of dry brushing. Instead of a little paint, you have a sloppy, wet brush. But the paint you use is highly watered down. It should be mostly water with just a hint of color on it. Coat the whole thing with a wash and you will be amazed.

If you don't feel comfortable doing this on your piece right away, you can always practice your technique on something else first, like a scrap of wood, or maybe your neighbors’ cat... Okay, not the cat, scratch that.