| Painting guide for beginners | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: 31st March 2006 - 02:46 PM (341 Views) | |
| Bassik Dwarveripper | 31st March 2006 - 02:46 PM Post #1 |
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A guide to painting miniīs, for the artisticly challenged. By Bassik Dwarveripper, for Mistress Miana. I am a bad painter. I suck. I have no eye for detail, and am undable to brush normally. Do you recgonise yourself in this situation? Then read on. Because in spite of me sucking, I won a painting contest and amaze my friends with my miniīs. HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE? Well its all in the technique you use. If you are a paint-scarred veteran who paints superb miniīs, then go away, you wonīt find anything new here. Step one. Basecoating. The basecoat is very important, because it defines the quality of your paintjob. I use black exclusiveley, even with my fairly light coloured high elves. This gives you more freedom to use the techniques I am about to share with you. A GW chaos black spraycan is my favorite to apply this, its fast, and gives the best quality. It is however bad for the enviroment, and owl playing moms might not apriciate it. You can also apply chaos black by hand, but beware when you do this: Donīt use too much paint or else it becomes too shiney. Especially on metal miniīs this can be a problem. It is betther to give several coats then one big fat coat. Step two: apply base colours. I donīt know what you are painting, but look what colour is most dominant on it. The big a darker shade of that colour, like Tanned Flesh for a fleshcolour, Regal blue for blue, etc. Make sure you donīt see any black stripes trough it, but again donīt make it too thick. Whipe your brush carefully on the edge of the paintcan before you apply the paint. Continue to do so with all colours. Step three: the highlight. Take a lighter version from the colour you want to higlight, or mix that colour with white/other variants(such as rotten flesh and catachan green makes a nice highlight for catachan green) Now, carefully whipe off most of the paint on your brush, and move the brush quikly over the area you wish to highlight. The raised areas should get the desired colour now. Donīt do this with fine detailed things, like skin. Instead, (for skin) grab a small dot of Elf flesh and paint the raised areaīs on dwarf flesh, or in case of a paler race(like Elfs) use bleached bone on Elf flesh. Be patient, and correct error immidiatly. Thats it. Paint the details, paint the metals, and youīre done. Note: basing is more important then normally with this. it can make or break your paintjob. I allways glue sand from the beach on the base, and paint it (or keep it sandy in some cases) and add patches of green flock on it. Its simple but looks very good. This will not make you a awesome painter immidiatly, but it sure helps you if you realy suck at painting. And in time, you learn to master this hopefully, and amaze your oponents with a greatly painted army. |
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| chumdab | 31st March 2006 - 09:39 PM Post #2 |
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lol u must have been pretty bored to type all this down, some things are a lil vague 4 a newbie but u get the gist Cheers CHumdab ;p |
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| Bassik Dwarveripper | 1st April 2006 - 08:52 AM Post #3 |
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Well I made it to help Priestess Miana, and tought it would be nice to post it on the UE as well. What is still vague, then? Mind explaining why this is not helpfull? |
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| Kritolk of Fester Spike | 2nd April 2006 - 03:36 AM Post #4 |
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Couple of things I would add/change in this is 1. When painting always water your paint down, it took me a couple of years to start doing this, and the difference was immediatly noticable. Only ever put a small amount of paint on your pallet, and when you water it down just put the tip of your brush in the water, and then mix with paint on the pallet. 2. Always use a pallet even if it is just a spare peice of paper, although a tile i've found is best. This will help with mixing paints, and watering. 3. What Dwarveripper describes as highliting I would call Dry Brushing, it's a very simple technique that gives very good results. The aim is to use brighter colors and less paint as you move out from the recess of the model. 4. basing is all important as it will take an alright model to a good model, you only need to use the Dry Brushing technique (also a very good way to learn to drybrush) 5. With metals put a layer of tin bitz down first then paint over the top of it with the metal you wish to use. 6. Inks and Washes are your friends, like basing they can add a whole nother level to the model just by adding depth. GW sells a range of Inks, of these I only use brown (I just haven't found a use for the rest) I generally mix the Ink as 1 part Ink: 10 parts water, then apply thinly over the parts of the model that you want to add depth to. A Wash is simply taking a dark GW paint and adding water to it, I generally use 1 part paint : 20 parts water, this can look really good, but be careful to water it down enough or else you will stuff up the paint job. Black Wash is my favourite for doing this. One real bonus of washes over inks is that washes will not leave a shiny finish, whilst some inks will. This is all fairly simple to do and will (in my opinion anyway) and will make it that much easier to paint an army, all that will be left will be trying to find the motivation and patiance (qualities I don't have) |
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| Bassik Dwarveripper | 2nd April 2006 - 11:00 AM Post #5 |
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Very good points, Kritolk of fester Spike, I also wanted to add the ink thing, but the person for wich this guide was ment is alergic to them To add some stuff: Using different metals can realy make your model stand out. I find brazen brass a very cool alternative for armours. My Stormvermin are completeley brass(with boltgun details) and I realy like them(I mutate this post later with pics). If you want to paint gold, I find the best way is to undercoat it with tin bitz first, and then give it a shining gold coat. This gives a betther look, since we all know shining gold doesn't stick as good as other metals. non metallic metal is a technique I recently started using, and I don't realy have mastered it yet, but I do got some decent ideas for magical blades: My Demonette's all have blue blades. I gave the blades a coat of regal blue over black, highlited it with enchanted blue, and painted the edges with ice blue. You can also do this with Skaven weapons, using green tones instead. Something like Dark angels green->snot green->goblin green->scorpion green, and maybe a ink wash. |
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| Kritolk of Fester Spike | 2nd April 2006 - 11:19 AM Post #6 |
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there is alawys one isn't there :rolleyes: There is a very good guide for painting nmm on the B&C, I'll mutate a link when it comes back online, done by a canadian Golden Deamon winner. Glad I could help |
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| Dirty Harry | 2nd April 2006 - 11:30 AM Post #7 |
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You missed out one important thing: practice. If you paint one layer on 1 or two models before you go to bed eachnight and try to do it well it will only take you 10 minutes and your painting will begin to improve noticably. I went from crap to average to decent in the space of a bout 3 months. |
| Death is Death. Live with it. | |
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| hakoMike | 2nd April 2006 - 03:13 PM Post #8 |
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More grey every day.
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Regarding inks, I barely use GW inks anymore. An acrylic floor polish (brand name Future here in the states) mixed 50/50 with water is a great medium for wash that I prefer to a dilute ink wash. Almost every mini I paint gets a scorched brown / floor polish wash at some point now. The only thing I would miss inks for is blacklining, but I think that could be accomplished with a 50/50 chaos black to floor polish mix. Either that, or I have used a micron pen for blacklining in the easier to reach places. Whatever you call your highlighting technique, if you like the results then use it! ![]() I also like to go to coolminiornot.com and search on the same model that I am painting. Sometimes seeing a very well painted version of what I am doing can give me some ideas as to what techniques work. Just don't get frustrated when your minis don't look as good as the examples you are comparing them to. There are some amazing artists on that site... |
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So old. So so old. My CMON Gallery | |
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