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I know there are gamers who will wretch at the thought, but my health has declined, though my desire to work on my collection has not. I’m looking for something relatively easy, as far as painting is concerned, but that will nonetheless make an attractive set.

The pieces pictured are a chess set, of course. Effectively they are just dipped plastic pieces. But I wonder if a similar effect couldn’t be applied to any set of miniatures that had gaming applications for battles of two or more sides.

Let’s say, for example, that you painted a wood elf army by the simple technique of dry brushing the bare metal or plastic figures gold, and then spraying the piece with a transparent green.

Now, for their opponents:

Dwarves: dry brush gold, spray transparent yellow.
Medieval humans: dry brush silver, spray transparent blue.
Orcs: dry brush bronze, spray transparent red.

Etc.

It seems that this could have almost an infinity of applications. If you wanted to do Napoleonics, the human and orc colors become French and British respectively.

I’m kind of enamored with this idea, so I’m going to try it at some point over the next week or so with a few stray figures lying around the house.

As to player characters or specialty monsters, I think those would be few enough that they might be painted as normal without ruining the overall effect, or perhaps painted as the other figures, but mounted on bases decorated in some way: maybe with jewels or coats of arms?

While something like this might be heresy to old school gamers, I think that it might have a good look, especially for someone who wanted to dip his finger into miniatures gaming, and whip up a couple of painted armies in a weekend.

Any similar ideas, or thoughts on this one - or maybe even letting me know if this is already a thing - would be appreciated.

That seems like a lot of work for something that isn't really any more aesthetically appealing than using cardboard tokens or paper cutouts. And you'd need to at least spray a primer layer underneath the drybrushing, drybrushing on bare plastic doesn't work very well. Prime, 3-4 layers of drybrushing to get decent coverage, and a transparent color starts getting really close in effort to a primer base and contrast paints for a real paint scheme.

I think it’s a fine idea. Get started with two opposing armies quickly and you can always add more details later if you’re so inclined. Seems like a good and relatively inexpensive way to get a friend into the hobby too.

ThePaintingOwl: I dunno about that. There are a lot of figured chess sets done by similar techniques, as above, but I've never seen anyone playing chess with paper standees (not that I have anything against those either).

Gulgog TufToof: Thank you sir! My thoughts are, if its good enough for the most ancient wargame ever created. it ought to be good enough for us!

But either way, why not give it a pop? At the worst, I'd have some figures to strip, at the best, I might be on to something cool!

--So far the positive vote is at fifty percent. Far better than I expected! ;-)

I would be interested to see how it comes out.

With that said, I have done similar techniques for terrain pieces (think old rusty statues). It looked fine, with minimal dry brushing of dust, dirt, and other "weathering" the piece really looked finished on the table with minimal effort to get it to that point.

I stand by my first sentence, I would be interested to see how it comes out.

Cheers!

To be honest, that looks a lot like what you get from priming a figure something other than white and then using one of the various "paint and shade" speed paints (Contrast, Speed Paint, etc.) on the model.

I did some Guildball sets and some Warmachine starter boxes up in two-color paint schemes and they look nice enough. The big benefit is that because of the shading, you can see the details on the models more easily and it's easier to tell models apart.

I wouldn't recommend dry brushing bare metal (metal primer exists for a reason) or plastic (unless you really like the color of the plastic, and, again, primer exists for a reason).

 NapoleonInSpace wrote:
ThePaintingOwl: I dunno about that. There are a lot of figured chess sets done by similar techniques, as above, but I've never seen anyone playing chess with paper standees (not that I have anything against those either).

Those chess sets work because they have a factory line making them by the thousands, preferably in a country with no minimum wage laws. If you're doing your own work you aren't going to have the factory line efficiency and you'll end up spending almost as much effort as it would take to do a basic tabletop-quality scheme with contrast paints.

 NapoleonInSpace wrote:

I know there are gamers who will wretch at the thought, but my health has declined, though my desire to work on my collection has not. I’m looking for something relatively easy, as far as painting is concerned, but that will nonetheless make an attractive set.

The pieces pictured are a chess set, of course. Effectively they are just dipped plastic pieces. But I wonder if a similar effect couldn’t be applied to any set of miniatures that had gaming applications for battles of two or more sides.

Let’s say, for example, that you painted a wood elf army by the simple technique of dry brushing the bare metal or plastic figures gold, and then spraying the piece with a transparent green.

I think the easiest possible miniature painting technique would be slightly different than you are envisioning.

It sounds like you are saying: dry brush, then wash

Dry brushing a bare metal/plastic figure is jumping the gun in my opinion. Leaving bare plastic/metal isn't an attractive sort of thing to have under your drybrush and undermines your paint's attempt to actually stick.

Priming I think is a very low effort step that resolves the issues with just straight up painting.
Following the priming you can if you want skip the dry brushing stage entirely and do a wash, or go on to dry brush AFTER washing.


I believe this to be the lowest mechanical effort way of painting. If you add priming before your two steps of brushing and transparent paint, and reverse the order of transparent paint/brushing to do the transparent wash first, I think that is a good result for low effort.

I'd have to see examples to get past my initial thoughts, and I'm not sure they'd change those thoughts. My initial thought is it's worth trying a couple pieces, but I don't think you'll have an attractive set. 50+ miniatures all looking like one of those chess pieces...Does not sound great, and would be hard to play against as there would be no visible differences in the models to pick out wargear and whatnot. You could of course then go in and paint the war gear but then you're putting a bunch more time into it. When I try to imagine an army simply dipped or sprayed one color, the image that I conjure leads me to view it marginally better than unpainted plastic or plastic washed in nuln oil in terms of attractiveness.

If you really do want something like what you're describing, I'd just prime with a metallic looking primer and then wash over the pieces. To get contrast in recesses, I'm not sure I'd be spraying the wash vs just using a brush.

Past that...If you want really quick and to look like risk pieces, just spraying them with a colored primer and calling it good could work.

I say go for it. Look at certain box sets from GW, like for example the Space Hulk Set. You have your Blood Angels Terminators in red, and your Tyranids in blue/purple. I think this works pretty well to differentiate the two armies. It might however be suited more to small size forces rather than large ones. A full 2000 points worth of tyranids, all basecoated and painted exactly the same without any extra detail, might make it a bit hard to tell special minis apart from the rank and file. Just my two cents.

I definitely would pick two armies with different base colors as feisty suggests and then spray primer them both in their base colors. It’d be easy to start an all blue Ultramarines army for example and have them battle all green orks. Again, you could add more colors later as you get more emotionally invested in particular minis or the armies as a whole. Also pick the options when building characters that make them stand out (crested helmets, etc.) from the standard troops.

I thank everyone for their input so far. What I’m hoping to accomplish here is something very different from a beautifully painted, realistic army.

Rather, and from your replies, I think many of you do get the idea, I’m hoping for nice looking game pieces. Realism isn’t at play here.

In fact, if this turns out the way I hope it will, it will look something like a set of jewels carved into game pieces.

Thus, let’s say I start with an ork. Let’s make him a metal piece to simply things.

I’d just spray him maybe with a white primer, dry brush -fairly heavily- perhaps a gold or copper over that, and then a transparent (Testors maybe) green over that. Finally a gloss coat.

Again, I know this is pure heresy to many of you, but I’m going for something completely different here.

The idea, if it comes out right, is that I will have a set that looks like carved jewels.

***

Okay, hotshot, you reply, so what’s with the all talk and no action? Howzabout putting your money where your mouth is, and show us something?

Two things there.

First, I’m not quite well enough at the moment, and don’t want to charge in until I feel a little better.

Second, I’d like to get this right the first time, so I’d like your advice.

I was thinking of trying it with some Risk pieces and seeing how it worked out.

Again, any suggestions on the proposed techniques will be greatly appreciated.

 NapoleonInSpace wrote:
The idea, if it comes out right, is that I will have a set that looks like carved jewels.

That's the thing I don't think you're getting. You said in your first post "I’m looking for something relatively easy, as far as painting is concerned" but making an army that looks like carved jewels is not easy. Drybrushing metalic paint over a white base coat is going to look patchy and streaky, more like stray brush strokes that didn't get cleaned up than deliberate painting. What you're going to need to do if you want this to look at all decent is a clean base coat of the metal color followed by a couple layers of hightlighting with lighter metallic shades, then the transparent color coat. You're talking about several layers of paint and it will need to be done cleanly, not by a quick drybrush.

If your goal is a minimum-effort painted army then what you want to do is dump the "chess set" idea and do a basic contrast scheme. Prime white, paint each element with the appropriate contrast color, done. That's far less effort to get something tabletop-ready than any of your other ideas.

There are some versions if this that are relatively easy to pull off. Painting something to look like stone for instance. (Several tutorials online.) Or to just do a base colour, shade + drybrush. This would look great on game pieces to a boardgame. It just empethises their shapes a whole lot more.

However, as somebody pointed out contrast paints has made this much more easy then it used to be. Picking like a two or three coloured scheme is almost as easy and would look better.

Edit: Also don't do metal over white. In my experience metal over black is better. If you are going for a mono coloured scheme just buy some turbo dork metallic paints. That look lovely.

 ThePaintingOwl wrote:


Drybrushing metalic paint over a white base coat is going to look patchy and streaky, more like stray brush strokes that didn't get cleaned up than deliberate painting. What you're going to need to do if you want this to look at all decent is a clean base coat of the metal color followed by a couple layers of hightlighting with lighter metallic shades, then the transparent color coat.

I think it can work, and you already put forward some great ideas that can help accomplish it.

I think it can look pretty cool if the minis are primed with a slightly darker metallic basecoat, then all drybrushed with a much lighter silver metallic paint, and then finally painted with eg. Tamiya Inks. As far as I'm aware, they do come in different colours, don't they?
I'm pretty sure Napoleon could achieve at least a gem-like appearance with this relatively simple, three-step process and get some pretty looking, shiny metallic playing pieces. Sure, it might not win a painting competition, but I don't think that's the point.
Anyways, interested to see what you come up with, Napoleon

 FeistyRips wrote:
I think it can work, and you already put forward some great ideas that can help accomplish it.

It can work, my point was that OP came up with this idea specifically because he thinks it would be easier than normal painting. You can make colored metallic "chess set" miniatures but to make it look even halfway decent is going to take more effort than a basic contrast scheme. The idea is a complete failure for what OP was trying to do with it.

Thanks again for all the advice and suggestions, gents. I'm having some work issues at the moment, along with health issues, but I hope to get to work on it early next week.

I'll upload photos as we go.

Win or lose, I think it will be fun.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
One last question, though, before I get started.

Have any of you had experience with transparent spray paints? Any tips there?

Again,
thanks

Found a page that might be relevant to what you're trying to accomplish Napoleon: https://war-of-sigmar.herokuapp.com/bloggings/3876

Apparantly they use a metallic primer and then apply GW Contrast paints through an airbrush and it looks pretty nice. I imagine a squad or a whole army would look very cool using this technique.

Whatever you decide on, looking forward to your results