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So I'm a beginner and my painting really sucks. But I want to get better, and with orks as my canvas I have a lot of painting to do. I've noticed that a lot of you are really talented. So my question is how did you guys become so good? Just a lot of practice? Did someone help teach you the tricks of the trade? DId you take lessons? Were you born with it?

Practice

Research (websites, talking to other painters, ect)

Time

It comes down to stages and then how you apply your technique and tricks at each stage will separate you as a painter.

My stages are what I like to call ABWDGD-B.

A - Assembly, glue, file, clean, and pose your model.
B - Base Color, lay down a clean foundation of base colors. Read about rudimentary color technique and how to use a color wheel.
W - Wash, shadow your model with washes.
D - Drybrush (starting out, highlight when more advanced) Drybrushing is easy to do and provides quick results, but you'll move on as you get into more advanced highlighting techniques.
G - Glaze. Pull your colors back together with Glazes (thinned washes) and enhance your colors.
D - Detail. Don't stop detailing your model until you are ready to abandon it. No artist ever completed a project, they just abandon them.
B - Base. Finalize the model's base and make it consistent.

My technique came from reading the 'Eavymetal courses by Mike McVey. Today it's more grittier and all this NMM stuff, but that just makes my tech stand out more to me.

so would you say the book is helpful for a beginner. I paint in stages too, I just don't have my technique down. Normally black prime coat, layer of DA green, layer of 50/50 DA and Snot, 25/75 of the mixture, then just snot, for my ork skin, but I am just bad at highlighting so it never comes out very effective.

Use good brushes and decent sized ones, dont try to paint the whole model with a 00 brush. Thin your paint, pretty much all paint still needs to be thined from the bottle. Paint in the lines, keep you colors where they are supposed be. Clean bases coated model look good on the table, and help make your finished product look better. Put your time in.

A good tutorial where you observe someone paint can
do wonders. This can happen at conventions or maybe
there are some on youtube (I don't know, can't check
from work).

I too have looked for the magical shortcut that would make me a Golden Demon winner overnight.

I have read several guides and tips and instructions. And while I have learned a great many useful techniques and approaches that were worth the time to learn, I still had not found the one guide that I was looking for:

The Guide to How to Paint Cleanly and Quickly

I wanted the guide that would teach me how develop supernatural powers so that my hands were guided to paint perfect Hazard Stripes and Checker Patterns with single strokes and no errors.

Alas, there is no quick cheat for that. Just practice. Lots and lots of practice (and trial and error to learn what works for you).

Everyone here has their first miniatures that look like crap but they adore to no end. And every army you paint will look better than the previous. So there's no secret. Just paint. With every miniature you paint, you get better.

You need to learn the techniques and practice.

You don't need all the techniques, only the ones that fit your style and requirement. For example, multiple layers of glazes and washes are pointless on figures for gaming. A good basecoat plus dipping and highlighting will produce good enough results a hundred times faster.

Also pay attention to finishing. Little bits of details on the equipment and base detail and such can add a lot to the appearance of a figure without being very hard.

If you live by a GW you can get tips and tricks from the staff there. They do offer lessons, but I dont recommend them. They're expensive, and you can get the same information from asking questions. But if you are looking for techniques and critiques from a live person as you go, perhaps the painting clinic would be the right choice.

As an aside to your color palate, DA green to snot green is a hard transition. I recommend substituting orkhide shade and goblin green. You can highlight up to snot if you want. You have a 4 step process, you could realistically get it down to 2 and get excellent results, if you learn to overbrush.

If you are looking for a gentle progression from color to color, and dont care how much time you spend painting, I recommend picking a middle color and shading up.
for example,
Orkhide shade- OS Goblin Green-GG Knarlock Green KG

base OS, Highlight 1 3/4OS+1/4KG, Highlight 2 1/2OS+1/2KG, Highlight 3 1/4OS+3/4KG, Highlight 4 KG- and on until you hit a highlight of straight GG. Its nine steps, and you have to diminish the highlighted area every step, but the more you do it the more you get a feel for how it ought to look.

I think one of my problems is blending. I know what colors go where, but either the colors look too separated, or in order to avoid this, I end up loosing one of the colors in an attempt to blend.

PS I was wrong it is Goblin, not snot.

I found the How to Paint Citadel Miniatures book was actually pretty handy. It went over a lot of different techniques and tricks for a variety of styles. The bit about color theory is nice too, since sometimes lightening colors doesn't work quite like on would think.

Otherwise, just try different things, and practice.

In terms of highlighting in particular, I find that a dark base coat with layers of thin paint works well for centerpeice models, but the average grunt gets by with a dark base, a medium tone and a highlight, applied in the order with leaving a some of each layer showing. Simple, doesn't look amazing from up close, but from 2-3 feet away looks great.

Kilkrazy's advice is really good too I think. I find 2 main things make a model look pretty damn good. Maybe not awesome or WOW, but good and solid:
1: Clean painting. Taking the time to correct mistakes properly really seems to make the difference between an ok painter and a good one.
2: Picking out details. Even a pretty basic paint job with mundane amounts of highlighting and color variation looks good when you have the details picked out.

I am an okay painter. Some might evenn say a good painter. Either way I would not be half the painter I am with out one thing .... criticism.

Paint something and then ask folks what they think. Look for the criticisms. They will help you.

Other than that... thin your paints and find styles that you like. I can't blend for crap but for the result I want that is unimportant. You can get great effects with dry brushing and dipping orks.

ender502

Practice and repetition.

The first step is learning brush control. Don't worry about any of the other things like blending, drybrushing, washes, or whatnot until you have the ability to paint small areas within the lines and get a consistent colour.

As Wehrkind said, clean painting, and taking the time to pick out all the sculpted details on the model have the most impact right off the bat.

Once you have brush control down, then start looking into other techniques, and start applying them where relevant.

When I started playing GW games, in 2004, I'd been painting minis for about 20 years. I've probably improved more in the last four years than any of the time before that, simply because there's a reason to do it. When you're only painting models for yourself, you do what you do. When you're getting painting scores at tournaments and competing in painting contests, there's a strong motivation to improve, and you get to talk to the other people doing the same thing, and learn their tricks.

Hello. Here's my two penneth (I consider myself a pretty good painter, that's probably just arrogance, I have won some competitions though, and I'm a long time ork painter)
First rule: ALWAYS UNDERCOAT BLACK!!!!! I cannot emphasize that enough, any other colour makes shading look all wrong, and you can blend much better off a black base, don't spray green or anything like that, if you miss some on another colour it will look terrible , black will look like shadow .
Second: Water down your paint, a lot. Keep your layers as thin as possible. (For the person who was asking about blending, this is the key, the thinner the paint the easier it is to blend with, also see my point about glazes). Thick paint obsures detail and looks rough and messy.
Third: Glaze at the end. To make a colour look richer and to make any blending, highlighting or drybrushing (which should be avoided if possible, highlighting is harder and more time consuming, but once you learn it your models will look loads better) apply a REALLY thin ink wash over it. It should be about ten parts water to one part ink. Use dark green ink for ork skin, brown on reds and black/brown on metals. After the glazes on the metals try to pick out the outline again in the original colour if you can, but keep this really fine, or just leave it if you don't have the confidence, it'll still look good.
For ork skin start with dark angels green, then goblin green/dark angels 50/50, then goblin green on the raised areas. Glaze it with green ink then repeat the goblin green stage very finely. If you want more highlights, either add rotting fless or sunburst yellow in very small amounts to the goblin green.

The most important thing is practise though, and patience. The more time you take, the better it will look. Keep your pallete as limited as possible so the whole thing feels unified, and you'll be on to a winner. I personally hate dipping and drybrushing, but if you just want to quickly paint an army and don't care if it looks great, go for it. It'll take more than that to become a great painter though, young padwan.

Next week, how to bake a lovely carrot cake in ten easy steps.

To answer the topics question, the simple answer is practice. I've been painting minis for going on 20 years now. Back in high school I worked at a hobby store and that's where I discovered the whole thing but didn't get into GW stuff till around '93 or '94. I still have some of my real old stuff and it's really, really, really bad. Nowadays I'll spend hours upon hours on a single figure till it's perfect or at least good enough for me.

So if you're like me, keep at it, and in 20 years you'll get better hehe

Really though with the web now you can find out about all kinds of techniques. If blending is your problem, try maybe the layered blending method. Start with your base color usually the darkest part of the area and paint it all over, dark blue for example. Then get your lighter color like a light blue, and water it down a lot.. like 25% paint and 75% water. Then use the watered down part to paint the raised areas. When that dries, do it again but stay not as far out as you did before. Keep going like that tll you build it up to the lightest color and you should have a smooth looking gradient if you did it right. It takes practice but you should figure it out after a few attempts. If it works, I attached a quickie photoshop example of what I mean with building up the layers of wash farther away from the dark spot

Just keep in mind it will take longer to do but the end result will look really cool once you get the technique down and it's really not that tough as long as you can paint inside the lines, like we all learned with crayons back in the day

One thing you are all emphasizing which I haven't tried is watering down colors. I'm stuck in finals right now, and thus on a painting hiatus, but now I'm excited to be finished and try again.

I must say the one thing that upped my painting was this article on simple brush control in the white dwarf issue of the same month that 4th edition tau came out. You can read about all the blending and other things, but simply knowing how a brush looks when it's "full" vs. when it's "useful" is loads better than reading article #1234 on how to blend. Now I can blend pretty nicely.

After brush control it's just all about watching the behavior of the paint. You need to know exactly what a high surface tension blob of paint looks like since you won't be able to blend it as well. Similarly, "runny" low tension paint and that weird kind of paint that evaporates on you should be observed and their applications noted.

Take your time. I use painting to relax and de-stress really, and I rarely give myself any kind of deadline, but I dont play much. Just keep it fun. If you get tired of painting your 15th ork boy, go ahead and start on that warboss ahead of schedule. although alot of people paint the characters last because by that time you will be proficient with your armies paint scheme and get a better result.

I remember when I first started I read alot about painting and looked at alot of miniatures wondering how they did that(I still do!) Keeping it neat is hard when starting, you will be going back over your work to clean it up alot.

Now if you want to get an army done pronto you need a plan. Figure out how to get the best results with minimum steps. If an area needs to be drybrushed like metal or fur, do that first so it doesnt mess up your base coat. I myself usally basecoat, then blackline, then highlight, then start having fun with the fiddly details. I dont aspire to golden daemon but I am proud of most of my models.

Hope it helps

The biggest piece of advice I can give is that you just have to have the mindset that you're going to take as long as needed to make the model look the way you want it to as opposed to just painting it enough for you to consider it "done".

When I started long ago, I hated painting and all I wanted to do was get models finished and on the table. My painting techniques really consisted of drybrushing and painting something a color and then giving it a black wash to try to give it a little darkness in the crevices. You can see the first model I ever painted on my profile page (its the Blood Angel terminator at the bottom).


I remember a specific point (although not the actual model I was painting at the time) where I just said to myself: "okay, I'm not going to just paint this to get it on the table. I'm going to paint this until I'm happy with it". And yeah, I had to re-paint some areas I had finished and wasn't pleased with, but the point is I just started spending a LOT more time on each model and the results quickly started to show up.

Sure my output slowed down (as it takes me a lot longer to paint each model now) but my models now look infinitely better.

The more time you spend painting your model also means the more time you're technically "practicing" the art of painting. And if you don't stop painting a model till you're happy with it that means you end up trying different methods and getting really good at the techniques you like and that work for you. In other words, the more time you spend painting each model also means the more you become skilled at the different aspects of miniature painting, as opposed to painting every model the same way every time with the same techniques.

All top points methinks, on brush control, I find it really useful to paint a load of lines on a tile, or whatever your mixing surface is, and then squeeze the brush between my lips to get a perfect point, others have different more savoury ways of getting a point, but this one does make your lips look like a psychadellic tiger. Which is ace.

Whatever you do, don't be afraid to try new things. Just learning drybrushing and effectively using washes can make HUGE differences in the appearance of a model. I've taken some pretty long breaks in my painting (years) but once you learn a technique it comes back fairly quickly. Another tip if you don't have steady hands, rest your wrists on the table edge... Which brings me to painting an appropriate height. It's kind of like typing where your body should be in a comfortable position. Probably underrated, but something that shouldn't be underestimated! Good luck! Oooh, and post pics and be willing to receive criticism. MOST people leave some truly intelligent responses and some brilliant advice, just have an open mind when you take it, and ignore the (surprisingly few on here, kudos guys!) jerks.

the best bet is too have someone show you the basics , base coat , dry brush , highlight .

a good base coat and dry brush can go along way .
usually the GW store is a great place to learn usually on sat. they offer a free public hobbie lesson . Also do what I played some games with people and when a good painter came along just asked him some stuff and asked to show me a few things . most people are more than happy too show some basic stuff .

Thanks all of you guys for all the advice. You are all making me hungry to paint.

I second the motion to lean your wrists on the table edge, it steadies you no end.

Skaskull wrote:So my question is how did you guys become so good?

By coloring in coloring books when I was a kid. After awhile, simply blocking in the shape with a single color just wont do, so you start shading, experimenting with various techniques on how crayons mix together. Crayons are a different medium than painting, but the techniques transfer over to this hobby well.

Miniatures (dollies...ahem...) are three dimensional coloring books after all.

I mean really, we're grown men painting dollies. (I am going to paint your silver pants blue! Oh! Yes, I am! )

When you keep it in that context, it becomes alot less daunting because you don't have to take it so seriously and alot of the stress involved in "doing it good" goes away and you start to relax and...just do it good. Its a lot like Zen. Understanding comes from understanding.

I have to disagree with the poster that says you have to prime black. To me it is a matter of preference and application.

For me, black primer is great for models with lots of metallic armor, and for creating darker, drearier models. However if you were painting models that have brighter more vibrant color, I would use white or gray primer.

There are no set in stone "Have to do's" when painting.

I would say that practice and patience are what you need to become a good painter. Also read all you can on painting techniques. The web can be an excellent resource, but also don't be afraid to spend money on books. I know over the last twenty years there has been an explosion of information so take advantage of it.

As far as priming goes, I´d agree with Thom, that black is not a necessity.

It all depends on what the end result is. I would never prime high elves black, nor would I prime a Dark Angel Marine white.

Think of what you´re aiming at, visualize, and you´ll get there.

Oh, and as for starter material, orks are perfect! If you manage to get a scruffed up, messy look, that´s orky!

Me, I started painting when i was 8-9 and I´m still nowhere near done, so just keep at it.

(And show us some piccies, for emperors sakes)

How to paint Citadel Miniatures by Mike Mcvey was how I learned. I'd avoid the new version, it's a pale shadow of the original book.

My 1st models were pretty crappy haha. but like everyone else said the biggest thing is practice. Then later i learned about washes. You will really be surprised what a quick wash with some highlighting can do. as far as blending goes you can really make anything blend into anything else. as an example if you wanna take a red to a yellow, take you red as a total base. then take orange and mix it with the red ( more with the lighter color a little of the darker color will go along way.) so you get a red orange and dry brush. then just orange, then orange and yellow with finally just yellow. But the biggest thing id have to say is patience and not to get irritated when you get paint somewhere you dont mean to.... keep it cool since you can always fix ( just remeber if you get a blob thin it out so its not odvious when you fix it )

nobosy starts out as a great painter so dont worry. If any of the top painters on here are able to post pics of their early attempts I'm sure they'd be no better than yours.

Prectise, pick up tips where you can. if you cant be good be neat.

I started off terrible, got to ok and improved drastically when I speant time as a redshirt, painting everyday and picking up tips from those around me really helped.

In this day of internet forums its never been a better time to learn.

Oh and dont let naysayers get you down, for some reason this hobby can attract people with a bit of an elitist attitude.




ps. the most useful "paint" to own has got to be chestnut ink, useful on most colours.