Dark skin tones- down the rabbit hole...

So, above you can see my recent paint job on the old 'Warrior Woman' model from Schaefer's Last Chancers, which I did to go with the rest of a Rapier battery crew that you can see over on my Deviantart. Whilst doing the write-up for those models, or in fact whilst I was thinking about that write up whilst painting them, I hit a bit of a problem.

You see, especially compared to the Raging Heroes models who form the rest of the battery crew, the Warrior Woman model's face is pretty hideous. GW have always been a bit hit-and-miss with female faces and this one was a very palpable miss. Here's the official GW pic so you can see what I mean:

I hope you'll agree that whilst I'm no 'Eavy Metal painter, mine looks a little nicer than that. Now it's when we come to the reason why that I started to run into trouble. To get the boil well-and-truly lanced, here's what I'm trying NOT to say:

"Because the model had an overly large, unattractive face, I painted her with very dark skin."

Now that's not what I'm saying, but I can see how someone might reduce it down to that. It's very noticeable that dark skin tones are rare on 40k miniatures and indeed, on miniatures in general, at least in my experience, leaving aside obvious things like Salamanders or African armies for historical games. To an outsider, that looks really odd- I mean really, really strange. For example, the default flesh tone Citadel paint is called 'Cadian Flesh Tone'. Cadia, let's remember is (or was, spoiler alert) a planet, and yet GW are fine with the implication that everyone on it is the same shade of Caucasian pink. I've tried to avoid that particular pitfall, if pitfall it indeed is- for example, a typical squad of my renegade Guard looks like this:

  

As you can see, I use a variety of tones to suggest an army drawn from a fairly modern society. In practice the models are put in squads fairly randomly so you don't get quite the quota system that's going on here. I think this squad only used three base colours- Kislev Flesh, Mournfang Brown and Zamesi Desert- whereas later squads also use Rhinox Hide and Cadian as starting points. Now here we begin to see one of the problems with the darker tones, which is that when used on a miniature they tend to hide the detail. This was the whole reason why I used the Rhinox Hide base colour on Warrior Woman, since it allowed me to dictate the shape of her features with the highlights. In general, the only way to deal with this issue is to go with more extreme highlighting than you usually would, which you can sometimes see on the rare occasions people do bare-headed Salamanders.

There are a few other related things to look at. One of these is the interesting phenomenon of armies like Marines where only a very few models have bare heads. Take a look at this image from the original Warhammer 40k Compendium:

 You might need to view that at full-size to get the effect. The thing is, when I saw that picture in my impressionable teens, I immediately assumed that all Marines of the Howling Griffons chapter were black, because the one Howling Griffon I'd seen with his helmet off was. There's probably some psychological name for that and it makes no sense if considered logically for even a few seconds, but it stuck in my head. It's very rare to see non-white Marines (yes except the Salamanders again) even though many, like the Dark Angels, recruit from several different planets- and anyway, the idea that everyone on a planet would be the same colour is pretty silly.

The other thing that's... interesting.. is the names of GW paints that are used for skin. As I mentioned earlier, the base colours I use for dark skin are either Rhinox Hide for the very darkest African black skin, or Mournfang Brown for a more Afro-Caribbean look. If you look on the GW website for 'flesh' paints, neither of them is there, and in fact all 13 paints are for white/ pink skin- though in fairness there's one called Bestigor Flesh so it's not like it's only the really dark colours that are named after monsters. Still, it does bother me a little effectively saying "I painted the light-skinned guys in the skin tone of the brave defenders of Cadia and the dark-skinned guys in the skin-tone of a big, angry beast".

Of course, while we're at it we could think about some of the Xenos races. We all know Tyranids come in all colours, and with Necrons it's basically a case of going for a re-spray, whilst Orks just get progressively darker green as they get 'arder, but for races like Eldar and Tau things are pretty vague. There certainly seem to be different mixes of blue and grey for Tau, but as for Eldar- have you ever seen a black Eldar? (Remember, if you're old enough, the shock of Tuvok, a black Vulcan, to some people) It makes some sense (ironically) for the Dark Eldar to be pale due to lack of sunlight, so should we expect Exodites to be darker?

I'm not going anywhere too profound with this, and certainly not suggesting anyone get cross about it all, but there's some interesting stuff there. It certainly seems the paint range could do with some paints named to suggest Asian (Cathyan Goldflesh?) or dark (Lustran Ebony?) skin tones (though of course Age of Sigmar killed both those names stone dead) which might help make people feel a little more included, but it's very much a first world problem. Still, something to think about next time you paint a squad of Guardsmen or Cultists, eh?