Hello!
I've been away in a hotel trip for the last few weeks and managed to sneak in a small painting kit: a 3d printed bust, the scale artist skin set, a black, a secondary blue and a random vallejo skin tone.

I'm trying to practice 3 different things:
1) painting a dark, black skin
2) using underpainting to give tonal variation, gain speed and help visualize shapes
3) blending it all without using an airbrush.

I apologize for the low pic quality, my phone + hotel lights + dumbass-me taking pictures is not a winning formula.

underpainting


where i'm at right now:

Looking good Lucas!

Cheers,
Ken

I took a few minutes this afternoon and took some pictures under a different light condition.



My initial reaction was to think I needed way stronger lights, but when i turn these to B&W I start feeling like i need to darken stuff more than highlight....


Anyways, I do enjoy the current levels of variation in hue on the skin, but I certainly need to work on contrast and softening up some transitions...

I haven't had time to paint this last week, but i did manage to take a couple pictures under different lights.

I did go back to this piece, at last!
I decided to try my hand at doing the 'sketch and refine' approach with the airbrush.
I went for some more sketches:


And applied a general glaze using a reddish brown paint for this final result :


For a bonus Pic, I used a spare bust to practice my airbrushing skills and got to this part here:


Cheers!

Thanks Nap!
I did use only the airbrush after sketching here.
Ideally I want to use the airbrush to soften all transitions, but this needs to be done in a somewhat controlled way, by going with a midtone over the sharp transitions at the edges of the sketch.
My current airbrushing skills are sub-par - and my airbrush is a cheap Chinese one - so I'm using those pieces to practice using the tool itself before I go all in with the technique.

BTW, this approach is often used by Sergio Calvo (with his 'capibases'), Trent Denison (like this one video ), Rafaelle Picca, etc.