How To Make Custom LEGO Minifigs - Painting Faces

hey everybody ross here on mgf customs back continuing the new direction the channel has taken with episode three how to make your own custom lego minifigures covering painting faces [Music] actually capturing people's likenesses and translating them onto a minifigure head now when i was a kid this was just simply not a thing it was just black dots and a mouth and that's usually what i would hear earlier on in this decade from some people that you can't really do a lot it is just two black dots and a mouth lego themselves have proven in the last decade with countless head designs that that is completely untrue and you can absolutely identify very specific features on a person's face and translate those into 2d painted designs on a minifigure head they don't always nail it they definitely rehash quite a few heads but when lego really goes to capture someone's likeness and nail it they really nail it and i've taken inspiration from them and numerous other customizers over the years since 2013 when i first started doing this by hand and it's definitely a very tedious skill and it takes time as always but it's so worth it in the end because it is so satisfying when you can just paint whatever face you need to onto a minifigure i've painted so many faces that i'm proud of over the years i could point to so many different examples from various showcases even going as far as to painting one of my best friends faces over christmas so it's gonna be a good time bear with me on this one as it might look a little challenging but it's definitely worth working at it if you haven't tried this before so let's get started to begin of course you'll need the same kit as mentioned in my first painting tutorial so a push pin which is again my primary tool for painting water-based acrylic paints found at basic craft stores here in the us or even at walmarts an index card to hold the paint a paint rag or a paper towel for wiping your pushpin an accommodating workspace where nothing around you is going to get ruined that's why i use a junky mouse pad and a crappy mouse decent lighting is kind of important here because it will definitely help and reveal to you certain things that you may not have been able to see otherwise with poor lighting then obviously a blank lego head these can always be found on bricklink if you do a little bit of digging maybe i can leave the part code down in the description or something however if you don't want to do that you can always use a bottle of brasso and a paper towel and scrub away an existing lego face design but that kind of ruins the finish on the minifigure head so i just always prefer to order the blank heads instead so we're hopping over to google images grabbing various pictures of his face throwing them in a folder so i can have these in front of me and then also you're going to want to head over to bricklink not just to buy your blank heads but also to gather inspiration so often when i go to paint to face i'll comb through the entire catalog of existing minifigure heads so i can maybe find a face that resembles what i'm sort of going for or maybe pull different things from other face designs and apply those to the face that i'm painting now in my case i'm pulling a picture of the lego cassian and or minifigure into my folder here as i do think i might take some inspiration from the eyes and mouth but i'm not entirely sure yet all right here we go getting started for real now dropping a bit of black paint onto our index card and getting a tiny bit of it onto the push pin so we can start to paint the black ovals for the eyes these are more than just black dots if you look at them on a lego minifigure you'll notice that they are a very particular shape and you want to make sure that you nail that that you kind of get the base right because these are the foundation for the rest of the face and you need these to look clean you need these to look consistent with how lego has theirs and you also want to make sure that they're not too close together or too far apart there's no alignment trick to this i just eyeball the positioning every time and if i get a little too high or a little too low then i'll just add and subtract paint on the top or bottom of the shape and once you've nailed that shape you can kind of go around the edges with more and more tiny bits of black paint to fix the jaggedness and if they get too thick you use the rounded off bottom of another push pin to smooth them over and just getting these shapes right in the correct position and clean looking sometimes for me if i'm having a bad day it can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour it's time to grab the white paint and dot the pupil so once we have that tiny amount of white paint on there this is where a little bit of precision comes through you need to take your time with this go slow lean your hands on the desk do whatever you need to do to stabilize your hands because you're going in and you're going to try your best to nail a circular shape right in the correct position where they need to be on the upper part of those black eyes you already painted even i don't always land this on the first attempt so what you're going to want to do if you do make a mistake with the positioning or you smear it or you use too much paint or it's just a big white blob or something happened you're gonna wanna have your cup of water nearby get a little bit on your pinky and just wipe it away as quickly as you can and don't rub too hard with the water but just light enough to where you're only rubbing away the fresh paint that you just applied and not the existing paint that you already have on there for the eye so you just want to be careful you don't want to apply too much pressure and just be gentle if you mess up but if the pupils already on there and it's dried and there's not much you can do because that's just going to create a build up on the eye and believe me it's not a pretty thing when your minifigures eyes are bulging off of the head i've had minifig face designs get really thick before and it's just not a good thing however if you were lucky enough to do what i generally do on the first try and get the positioning correct but not necessarily the shape the positioning is really all that matters because now you've got the bulk of the white paint in the correct position and you can take more tiny tiny bits of black paint and go around the edges of the white pupil to hopefully create the white dot you initially intended if you've made it past that step though now is where you get creative so looking at pedro pascal's likeness we're gonna be looking to identify any notable features on his face that we can replicate as a 2d marking on the minifigure head in this case i think one of those notable features is that his eyes almost angle downwards so i'm going to be painting sort of this border line that establishes that marking you see lego use these all the time on various different minifigures as a matter of fact you do see a version of this on the casting and or minifig that i was going to take inspiration from so what i need to do is paint the edge of that line almost within the eye and coming up really close to where i painted the pupil it even more downward all you need to do when going through this process is just keep applying tiny bits of paint keep repositioning keep tearing away paint with the push pin and much like the base of the eye it's gonna come out jagged and really not looking too clean at first but as long as you have the one edge of the design there you can go in after and clean it up with more tiny bits of black paint i wound up playing around with these slanted marks pretty much throughout the whole process here and there one thing you want to watch out for throughout the whole process of painting minifigure face designs is definitely excess paint that you otherwise can't see unless you glide a finger over the surface gently and these little bits of paint will stick out there'll be little strands there'll be little jagged bits sticking off of the paint you want to get rid of these even if you have to tear into your design you don't want these so if you find any little strands or bits of paint that are hanging off like this you want to pull those away and then if you need to go over with more tiny bits of black paint to correct now we're moving on to the eyebrows which are always a little bit easier than the rest of the face design but still require a lot of trial and error painting minifigure faces like really all customizing in general but especially with this it's always a little less clear how you might want to go about the shape of eyebrows if you ask me so in this case i'm taking a bit of inspiration for the eyebrows from a minifigure head from this photo right here the same law that i established when painting lines in my first tutorial pretty much applies here when you're trying to nail any specific positioning for any specific design and especially eyebrows now of course i want the eyebrows to be slanted because din jaren is a pretty serious guy and it's unlikely that he's going to be maintaining a neutral position with his eyebrows under that helmet and i want to kind of capture the seriousness of the character so by slanting the eyebrows we can begin to achieve that so you sort of start off on the top right corner of the eye and i like to do this upside down sometimes and then you're curving outward now i don't always nail the shape of the eyebrows edge at first but you want to get the shape on there so you can start chipping away at it with the push pin applying more tiny bits of paint pulling tiny bits of paint away and just shaping these eyes as you go this can take a while eventually i got there and this is the first iteration of the eyebrows painted onto the head and i also scraped away the bottoms of the base of the black eye because i want din jaren to be squinting as well next we're painting some wrinkles now these facial marks wind up being super integral and just as important as any other part of the design when capturing someone's likeness so in this case again taking from this image here by castle in the pool i want to create those same markings under the eyes on my din jar and minifigure so i'm just painting that initial curve with a splotch of paint because there's no way i'm going to nail that design first go but as long as i have the edge of the design the rest of the splotch doesn't matter i can scrape that away and then keep working at this keep checking for any excess bits of paint that might be otherwise coming off and just continuing to take more and more tiny bits of chestnut paint in this case and just adding to this wrinkle taking away from it and just continuing to shape and position it for both of them until i have recreated those marks now we're going to be doing the same thing in between the eyes to capture the creases in the stern expression denjarin is giving here and once again we're taking inspiration directly from this image so i'm eyeballing exactly where i want the particular edge of the left crease to be and once i've got that on there i'm constantly glancing back over at the reference to adjust and obviously the edge needs to be corrected as with the rest of the designs so i do that as well and then duplicate the process for the other crease by painting just that edge scraping away correcting scraping away correcting adding more paint correcting it's all trial and error for this next part i'm deviating away from the reference i was just using again courtesy of castle in the pool on instagram and now i don't want to use that same aggressive mouth design with the teeth showing instead i just want to figure out how i can translate pedro pascal's mouth into a little tiny 2d curvy black line and then this is also where i will be pulling a little bit of inspiration from the cassian and or mouth design and i essentially just get a general shape on there you just want to get the positioning right because you can very easily make the mouth too low or too high and you want to avoid that so i like to just place a tiny little center dot where i need the mouth to be so i get the positioning right and i don't really have to worry about it as much so i want to create a middle part here and then kind of have it arc up in two different directions and then come back down and that's kind of the best way i can describe it but what i did do in the center to create that very specific curvature is just kind of dash a little bit out of the middle with my push pin and then chip away at the edges going outward in this expression his lips can also be a little bit tight so that's something that i definitely wanted to make sure that i emulated here and kept in mind throughout the whole process and it's certainly something that lego also did with the cassia andor mouth i was also intentionally adding curvature underneath the mouth as well on both sides and doing this obviously again makes everything look jagged and imperfect so throughout the process of painting minifigure faces i also recommend that you dab with a little bit of water so that all of the paint is way more defined and you can more easily identify where the mistakes might be and correct them with more tiny bits of paint now you'll notice i already added some markings to the sides of the eyes and just beneath the mouth and again that uses the same process you paint the first edge on in the right position and then chip away correct chip away correct until you've got those markings on there too now this is where things get even more fun because we are painting facial hair now painting facial hair of any kind is uh is not going to be fun and i'm talking about stubbles because painting a beard is one solid shape that you can add onto we are not doing that today today we are using the smallest amount of paint you are ever going to use in your entire life and just dotting our way around the mouth or in this very specific case not just using dots but also trying to create tiny little markings that kind of come to a point and go inward but go downward at the same time if you look you can kind of see what i mean there are three dots that i used in the middle and then the markings next to them are are sort of uh they look like little turds but that's okay because we want the facial hair to look a little bit thicker like it does in the series around the mouth so we're painting more of those tiny little turds in sort of a curved arched position going around the underside of the mouth and again that uses the exact same technique identify the position of the first edge correct and then paint the rest and that goes for pretty much every single one of these markings if i'm unable to paint them perfectly on the first try let me tell you though this is where your patience will be tested because when painting these dots there are two things that are very important that you always have to maintain when doing this and that is correct positioning and thickness if one of these dots is too thick it's got to come off if one of these dots is too small you have to add more to it and you have to keep doing this going to the left and the right of the mouth until you reach generally where you think the stopping point should be or where the minifigures hairpiece is going to begin in this case i copied the stubble dots from this image here again and then continued arcing them all the way up to the hairpiece like i said so this whole process is just precisely applying each dot and also making sure that they're not too close together but that they're also not too far apart because we're also trying to attain a look of consistency among all of these dots and eventually you reach the end and it does happen it is possible and so i decided to maintain sort of a perfect order of symmetry with the first two rows of dots on both sides but of course i have a stubble and they don't look like that in real life you want to have some element of randomness so with the top and bottom rows i decided to be a little bit more forgiving and let those be a bit more randomized looking so they could look somewhat normal and you'll see lego do this on various face designs too where they intentionally of course go for imperfection with the facial hair now we have reached the end welcome to the end of the road that's pedro pascal aka the mandalorian himself din jaron's likeness recreated as a 2d design on a minifigure head this one was definitely fun for me to do but i'm so so satisfied with the end result i don't want to shoot my own horn but i'm really proud of this one and i think that's pedro pascal now that's how you paint male faces but lego has some very particular design tricks that they apply when creating female faces so in this example i have a character with asian features satiel sean from the original 2010 star wars the old republic cinematics and in this particular case once i've got the base of the eyes painted on i did a similar curved line but even though with pedro pascal's likeness this line curved the entire eye downward i'm not doing it in the same way here but it's generally the same thing it's just these ones are not going to curve the entire eye downward at such a dramatic angle like they did on pedro pascal she's also sporting a very stern facial expression in the hope cinematic except in this case they're going to be much thinner after painting some marks underneath the eyes i moved on doing the exact same process but because this is a female face design just like lego i'm also going to be painting the lips so i got to work on doing exactly that and the underside is generally the easier part because it's just a little curved blip that you just need to size up and correct going through the same process of chipping away and adding tiny bits of paint as you go it's the upper lip that can be a little bit more challenging creating that pointed design so i like to sort of paint a blob onto both sides of the mouth and then kind of tear away paint going downward to create corners on the upper lip then thin out the top of the lip go into the center of the lip and carve outward with the push pin to create those pointed designs and again all of this is going to require that you go in and clean up each part of the lip and just keep working at it keep looking at your reference and trying to get as close to the likeness as you can by identifying either how big you think the lips should be in this case or if maybe there needs to be a marking next to the mouth in my case i added some marks next to the eyes and eventually wound up thinning the eyes even more to create this very specific stern squinted look she has in that cinematic trailer and i also wound up reshaping the pupils a little bit going around the edges of the white dots because i thought they actually looked a little bit fish like earlier and i had to correct that and eventually i went back in and painted some eyelashes on either side of both eyes this is something unique to female minifigures because lego only does this on female characters and i thought that it would definitely work to support the likeness of satiel sean here so i definitely think it was worth it to go back in and add these yet again painting one edge of them closer to the first eyelash that was already there and then scraping away the other side and correcting both of them like this until they looked perfect so after a lot of trial and error because again that's the whole process with doing this i got satiel sean the descendant of bastille shawn from the old republic era and eventually this will be used on a half custom of the character using that unfinished sculpted hairpiece and finally that is going to do it for this how-to episode this tutorial i think is definitely going to be the longest one yet with how many little tiny intricacies there are that go into the process but here i have a ton of examples of other painted faces i have done in the past on other custom lego minifigures over the years you might have a little bit more insight now into the process and where some of these markings might have come into play on each painted face whether that was the eyebrows the eyebrow shapes the positioning of anything any little markings or cheekbones there have been so many faces i've attempted in the past that i had to scrap altogether and attempt multiple times because i wasn't feeling the essence of the character i was trying to do painting faces on lego minifigures for me is one of the most interesting and engaging things you can do as a lego minifigure customizer because you're creating a face that otherwise did not exist in lego's catalog and it's just so awesome in the end when you nail it and you're looking at the person whose face you were trying to paint but now it's on a lego head all right everybody there you go one of the most fun tutorials that i've done i was really looking forward to doing this as painting faces is just one of my favorite processes as a minifig customizer and i know that was definitely a lot but i do hope you will give it a try and if this video did help you at all in getting started with making your own custom minifigures or painting your own faces for the first time i'd love to hear it down below in the comments any feedback or questions you might have are greatly appreciated and i did just start up a new q a series so you can leave any questions you have over on the first episode of that also on the channel and i might actually answer it directly in a video next week otherwise of course you can always find me over on patreon posting all the progress that i'm making towards new minifigures for new showcases well before it reaches the channel here including the pedro pascal likeness that i use as an example in this video that was posted on patreon well well before i did this and tons of new long-form video content that i'm doing on there going way more in depth on all the different things that i'm working on than i actually do in the mainstream videos here and so that is always the thing if you want to consider supporting the channel that way otherwise of course you can always find me over on instagram twitter facebook and now tick tock posting all my work photoshop edits and montages it's definitely a really fun time and i post my skits over there too if you don't catch them here on the channel so i really appreciate all of you and adding value to your creative process over these last few weeks if you've tried any of these skills has uh definitely been a privilege for me and it's it's really cool being able to do this now and so on that note not sure when the next tutorial will be i didn't want to actually make it seem like these were going to be weekly um because of course there are so many other videos that i do here on the channel um and i kind of want to spread these out a little bit more but hopefully i will see you in the next tutorial in the not too distant future until then stay safe take care and keep creating [Music] you

Channel: MGF Customs

Views: 151,546

Keywords: lego, star, wars, super, heroes, war, games, sets, marvel, avengers, captain, america, iron, man, infinity, endgame, thanos, custom, figure, minifigure, art, painting, DIY, review, 2020, artist, acrylic, how to, how to make, actor, face, likeness, head, create, creating, creative, y u check tags

Id: 6K0Ly3Gfd3U

Length: 23min 44sec (1424 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 13 2020