The GRcade Tabletop Gaming & Miniature Painting Thread (Warhammer etc)

Some paints are just designed to be thinned before they are applied in multiple coats.

Painting up from black, you will never get a neat coat of red. You need to paint 2 or 3 layers. It's non toxic, so try just sucking the brush now and then, and regularly wash it (the moisture will help), dabbing with a wad of paper towel.

The back finish looks fine to me. You will get dips in solidity in areas. Just be patient and keep "patching in". It is the finishing touches that make a paint job.

With all art, you need to persist and wrestle with it. Be prepared to redo areas and don't beat yourself up before you're finished. There is a sort of 2/3rds point where things start to make sense.

I have spent months, years painting a model. Try breaking it down to certain colours or areas, metalics, solids, shades etc.

Also, there is an undercoat and then a base coat. Use a block colour, and then worry about finesse and shading later.

Keep at it!

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Thank you! I feel ready to dive right back in for some more painting now. But the bloody ironing needs doing. Boo! But really thank you. I hate how much of a perfectionist I am sometimes as it really does make you blind to everything good about a piece of work. I need to not worry and just enjoy the process. It really is fun. I'm looking forward to getting a finished product to show you all.

Another thing to consider is your brushes. Just 2 or 3 artists quality sable brushes will go a long way. Keep the tips sharp and neat with the little plastic protective cover. Oh and don't leave brushes soaking in water as they'll bend.

Synthetic (and even nylon :dread:

) brushes are no good for finishing work this fine as they bend out of shape much faster. I've still got brushes I've used for years, some of them are even deliberately a bit skewiff.

Use the old brushes for undercoating, dry brushing and stippling.

I also noticed people are scanning the painting guides for citadel stuff onto the web. Worth studying a few of those.

Don't be shy to blend paints either, a good thing for this is a piece of opalescent acrylic to paint in a swatch, or you can get disposable silicone sheets.

Re perfectionism remember it's the imperfections that give character. You're not using an airbrush or a machine. The texture of a base coat will actually help you apply successive shades as there is more tooth. The eye fills in a lot of detail, so always sit back from your work as it's tabletop scale. That'll also give you a better judgement of lighting when highlighting. Just copy the shadows and glare from wherever your light source is. That's basically the sun in miniature land.

You might want to study some minis from the 80s and 90s and see if it's more forgiving going for the exaggerated highlights and sort of cel shaded look. Eventually you'll develop a style of your own. Mine certainly aren't realistic, but I've approached a blend of styles that make sense when they look cohesive.

That's another thing when painting units, or anything repetitive for that matter. Consistency is one of the basic rules of artistic form. If something makes sense in and of itself, that's well executed.

So a few months back a kick starter for a game called route 666 was ran, my friend went in for it and I got him to get me an add-on, in the form of an unlicensed V8 interceptor, ye olde 73 Ford Falcon from Mad Max.

To pass some time I got round to painting it, more just to have on a shelf.

Based on the Fury Road old we see at the start on the movie.

Pics taken with my phone, not great, sorry.

EDIT - same scale as a matchbox car.

My converted Nurgle Stormtalon in Warhammer Visions recently.

He's actually called Shitstorm, but the White Dwarf team didn't accept that or my back-up name of Chunderbird One, so they went with Swarmtalon.

that's awesome!
and chunderbird 1 :lol:

Thanks! I'm pretty chuffed with him. Spent hours making that gross texture with a soldering iron. The mechadendrite things and the chimneys and gun are from the forge fiend kit.

Awesome! Was going to say and ask (soldering iron and those great tendrils). Hardly any Nurgle stuff officially available (decades ago), might pick up some for genestealer cult stuff but rare/expensive.

Looks like a blend of brushwork, airbrush and washes? A great blend of techniques anyhow.

Edit: Oh and looks like fog to me which suits but that bastard white residue you get from superglue on transparent stalks, I've recently found you can rub some away with water and tissue! Its powdery.

I get it on the 6+ limbs you have to superglue on metal 'nids which spoils my bright red carapace, but you can paint over it, a gooseberry fool when it comes to basing flying stuff though.

I'll have to check out those parts. Forge world / resin prices though :dread:

Edit: ah it's a chaos kit. I thought maybe "forge fiend" was some sort of range of bitz. :oops:

I've also been thinking about how to covert some marine vehicle into a Cultist transport, as I have a totally buggered Rhino from when I was about 8 years old.

There's no airbrushing - it's undercoated a khaki colour from a spray can, then a lot of washes, then the reds/browns/greens are sponged on and immediately smudged off with my fingers - over the rough surface it works well, much easier than bothering with an airbrush. You want it messy and uneven and random on anything Nurgle. The metal has a lot of nuln oil wash on then orange paint smudged on with fingers again so it collects in the recesses again. Then I drybrushed the thing with a sickly yellow, very lightly, to bring out the boils a bit.

It was loads of fun. Definitely recommend attacking anything with a soldering iron, it's a great effect. The tentacles are actually melted onto the body with bits of sprue, so they are more integrated. You can create all sorts of blobby growths that way.

Cool, like your hands on approach. Smudging, dabbing and smoothing with fingers is a great trick in all sorts of paint work.

I've not had anything that large to work on before, but I'll bear in mind for my rhino that I don't want to take literally decades like my Tyranid "tank" (carnifex).

The space marine Dreadnought arrived today (in an amazing hand made cube box with foam all around it, not bad for £3) and it's had the same soldering iron treatment for bullet holes. I do have a crap iron I wouldn't dream of using for electrical work, so I guess that's a reason to keep it. Reminds me a bit of Old One Eye. I'd like to try something crustacean like that.

Woah maybe a range of aquatic Tyranids which would make... No sense whatsoever on the table. So crabs then. Yeah, an army of giant enemy crabs.

Doesn't sound as good when you say it..

How? How do people get that good at painting these things? It's just completely beyond my grasp that models so small can come out like that from someone hand painting them.

To be honest I'd be more impressed if a machine managed to do the same thing.

The answer is simple. Hundreds upon hundreds of hours of practice. And some dexterity and colour theory and imagination and stuff.

Yeah - my boyfriend paints for GW and is so good, like leagues ahead of anything I can achieve. It's laughable to compare us. It's just his whole life. If he's at home, he's painting. It's second nature. He does it whenever he sits down, without thinking (and our house is full of models and paint so there's always something to hand). And what he can produce is amazing.

I do it to relax and consume lots of art energy stuff I can't do with things like websites. It gets my imagination going.

It requires mind bending (and sometimes even near painful) levels of concentration and patience, but I find it very therapeutic, and it eats time, worries and boredom like nothing else. My horde is slowly starting to resemble an army.

I've started up recently because some of my hobbies are a full time business now, so I need something just for me that's visual art (also do music). I even do it to procrastinate. The other day I spent about 40 minutes just trimming mold lines off some new minis but hey whatever gets me into the swing of things. It's also satisfying knowing that I've gone from total crap as a child to near GW publishable levels (going by like for like comparisons with codex, I wouldn't say golden demon) and created totally original sculpts like an ork horse because my own twisted mind thought why not. I'm going to get some epoxy soon too because I reckon I could sculpt.

It's nice to feel accomplished at something. And what I thought was awesome at the time doesn't cut it anymore. You have your own sense of progression. It just excites me.

The trouble is most people give up. I really don't believe talent has much to do with it as miniature painters come from all sorts of backgrounds. I know engineers and designers who are decent. Yeah I have an art background but it's never as detailed as minis which are also unique in that they're 3D and solid. Plus fluff.

Btw the standard of in house work has skyrocketed in the past 10 years so whereas one day I thought I might paint professionally I'm truly at awe of current day stuff. The eavy metal work on 3rd gen nids was a bit lacking imo, I think they rushed that range out for publication. The current pink nids are a higher standard.
Here's the 3rd gen 'fex

So much carapace detail missing on that imo.

I'll admit I just gave up, I tried a few times but I eventually found I just didn't seem to have the mindset, or maybe just the patience, for precision painting. I absolutely love assembling the models, but when it comes to painting them I just can't really find much enthusiasm.

Tell that to the guy who spent half his life painting one miniature. I mean I didn't even touch it for a decade.

Adult life sucks sometimes.

I never got gud at painting when i was in "the hobby", the only things i was proud of was a couple of 40k imperial Assasins and a conversion i did for a Dark Angels special character who didn't have an official model at the time, even then they still weren't half as good as the stuff in here.

I sold all my stuff years ago, but i can see why i like doing user-generated content in games nowadays; painting cars in Forza, doing custom wrestlers/arenas in WWE games etc., i get the same out of that without needing as much time, money or space.

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Green Gecko wrote:and it eats time, worries and boredom like nothing else.

That's one of the things I loved so much last weekend. I just forgot about everything and really relaxed.

Might not get a chance to do any painting this weekend though. Got to revise for an exam next Tuesday :dread:

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Had a good afternoon of painting today. I didn't worry about every little thing and it was so enjoyable and I can see everything coming together. I'm still just laying down base colours at the moment but I'm not far from shading now. Think I'm happy with the dwarf colour scheme I've been playing about with and I've decided to go for a slightly deeper red for their clothing. Only downside is that the first 3 I started have slightly brighter clothes because of the bright red coats beneath the darker red. But I think the difference won't be too noticeable if I stick them in the middle of the unit.

The dwarf on the left just has a couple of coats of the darker red, for example.

I'm almost ready to start shading this model too. Just gotta base his chain mail and a couple of details. And get him a hammer painted, ready to wield.

Out of curiosity, if I wanted to try adding a dirty effect to their capes, like they've been trailing in the mud, would I dry brush that before or after shading?

Can't wait to paint this bad ass king. Gonna break out the gold for his lordship.

Superb painting guys!

The GRcade Tabletop Gaming & Miniature Painting Thread (Warhammer etc)

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