Painting 101
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on to painting 102 (mass painting)
This is a very basic guide for miniature painters. I used a 28mm Reaper Ghoul figure for this demo. I'll try to explain basic planning and techniques and show their effect in pictures. Unfortunately a few are blurrier than I would like, but I think the effect will still show in those.
This figure was painted with Ral Partha and Reaper acrylic paints. A few citadel/GW paints were used, but only because I ran out of the others in the right color. There is nothing dramatically wrong with GW paints, but they were designed to dry out rapidly, and you have little time to mix paints, and often they don't seal well and dry out rapidly in the bottles. If you do use them, use a little lip balm around the threads to keep them sealed and threads clean.
There are 2 good colors GW does provide though - flesh wash and burnished gold. However, never use flesh wash for flesh! It looks awful and unreal. It is great as a stain for dirtying cloth, and texturing wood and leather.
For brushes, I use cornell white nylon. These are fairly inexpensive and durable. You want sizes from 1 to 000, with 00 being my default brush.
You want to keep wash water nearby, and a towel to dry brushes. You want to clean your brush frequently to keep it in good, pointy shape. At least once a minute, and sometimes more frequently. Try to keep paint away from the crimped section of the brush, as it is hard to clean paint from the crimped bristles, and paint drying there will splay a brush quickly.
A great addition to your paint is Liquitex Flow Aid. This is a thinner for use with acrylic paints. Water will work as a thinner in many cases, but to make a good wash (explained below), Flow Aid is superior to water in most cases.
I like to mix my own paints. This saves me money on weird colors, and lets me make colors not always available. When mixing paints, it is important to know that you just don't use white to lighten and black to darken. This create a pastel, cartoon effect if used excessively on a model. Yellow is generally a better color to lighten with, especially for reds, greens and browns, and purples and browns are usually better to darken with than balck (using black to darken is not as bad as using white to lighten). To mix a paint you can just use a few drops or brushfuls on a plastic tray - I like to use miniature blisters for mixing trays.
Ok, with all that in mind, here is a step by step description of painting a figure.
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This is a primed ghoul figure. It was cleaned with an x-acto knife, to remove mold lines and flash, then sprayed with a white metal primer. Any autobody primer will work fine - rustoleum is my favorite. Some prefer to use black or grey primer - however, the black undercoating dramatically reduces the brightness of the paints put over them. It's advantage is that places you fail to paint cleanly don't show up as badly. But that shouldn't really be a problem. |
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OK, once the primer is dry, its time to plan how you will be painting the figures. This doesn't have to be a chore, all you want to do is have an idea of what the figure will look like when done, and figure the easiest way to get there. I wanted this to be a pale, bloodless an somewhat moldy ghoul, with grey, old hair and a tattered loin cloth made from its burial shroud. In general, it is preferable to start with the lowest parts of the models, then move to the outer parts. This isn't based on feet to head, but on what areas are raised on the figure above others. For example, the tattered loin cloth and skull armor and hair are raised above the flesh of the figure. This means it will be easier to paint these raised areas without get paint on the skin, than it will be to paint those parts first and then work on the skin. So in this case, I start with the skin coloration. Since I will be doing a wash over this whole area, it makes sense to do it before any other area that would get messed up by a messy wash. I mixed white with flesh color to make a nice pale, undead flesh color. It probably could have been lighter still. This was generously painted over flesh areas, and I wasn't worry about being messy - those areas that got some flesh on them improperly will be easily cleaned up later. |
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OK, sorry this one is so blurry. I wanted a nice moldy discoloration to the ghouls skin. For this, I made a wash, instead of trying to paint each tiny little green patch. A wash is a thinned paint, which is brush over an already painted surface. It will tend to collect in the recesses of the figure, making deeper recesses darker than smaller indentation. To make the color, I took a bit of flesh and mixed it with a green color. I then used Liquitex Flow Aid, easily available in any art store, to make the paint very thin. You can also use water for this, but sometimes water will not move into the creases like a wash should. Using an old "Young Einstein hair" brush, the liquid wash generously brushed over the skin. gain, since this is the first area painted, being messy isn't a big deal. In areas that got too much liquid, some was removed by drying the brush on a paper towel, then "wicking" off some of the liquid. Let this dry completely before messing with the figure further. Also, if you feel you want the wash darker, you can rewash after the first one dries completely. |
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Ok, after the wash has dried, it is time to work on the other bits. None of the things painted here have any technique or detail involved, except the face. All of them will be touched on later to bring out detail through washes and highlights. For the eyes, I made a simple swipe with white, then put a vertical black line over it. To make the eyes face the right way, pretend they are looking at you, and then judge where to put the iris. It is ok to be slightly sloppy. After you paint the eyes, use a slightly darker flesh color to cover the places where the eyes slop over - basically you make the eyes a little messy, then use a flesh color to shape the eyes to their final form. The mouth was a red darkened with purple. White was then very lightly brushed over the teeth to highlight them. You can do a darker flesh color to bring out a miniature's lips, but it did not make sense for the undead. One final addition not shown in the photos is to paint eyebrows over the eyes. |
OK, time to finish it all up. The loincloth was washed with a thinned GW flesh wash, just like the skin was (only with more care to keep it from spilling onto the skin). This brought out its detail while making it look dirtier.
The leather straps were painted with non-thinned flesh wash, but no excess was left on the straps. Just a thin layer to stain the leather and make the detail show.
The skulls were washed with black thinned by Flow-Aid. There are black washes you can buy, but too often they are messy. The skulls were washed pretty heavily, and drops were places in eye sockets to be sure they were darkened properly.
The hair was drybrushed. This is a technique that is very brutal on brushes, because you are essentially letting a thin layer of paint dry on the brush before using it. I recommend rinsing the brush every 30 seconds or so to keep it for getting Einstein hair. But, if your brush does go that way, it is still useful for messy drybrushing and paint mixing. Just always keep a new back up brush around.
OK, to drybrush, you make a color slightly lighter than the color you are drybrushing over. Put a bit on the brush, and gently pull it over a peice of paper a few times, until only a little paint comes off. Then, gently pull the brush over the area being drybrushed. A light layer of paint will stick to the raised areas, bringing out detail in a different way from a wash.
Often, it is good to do 2 or 3 layers of dry brushing, with each successive layer being lighter than the previous. This is how I often do hair and cloth, including this creatures hair. It was first base coated with a dark grey, then a lighter grey dry brushed over it, and then a still lighter grey was even more lightly brushed over its hair. For some hair, adding a metal color to the lighter dry brushing can really bring the hair to life. However, these being undead, I didn't think they needed that. A little silver is good with grey and white hair, gold for blonde or red hair, and brass for deep red hair.
Finally, the base was painted with a dark grey. The whole thing was sealed with a non flaking, ultrahold hair spray. I have tried many sealers, and for a slightly glossy look, ultra hold hairspray works great. For a flat coat, nothing beats testors dull coat. It is expensive, but creates an almost invisible, strong seal.
I hope that helps, and feel free to e-mail me at: thane@thanesgames.com
