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Tonight I am going to start painting on some of the newer models in my collection that I am going to be bringing to TSHFT. In doing so I will go through the process of what I do when I paint them up. If any of you see any real flaws in what I am doing please let me know so that I can change bad habits.

The first thing I do with my minis is clean them, file off the mold lines, and then prime them with black primer. I was thinking about doing white for the scouts but decided against it and went with the black. Once that is done I dry brush the whole mini in boltgun metal. This brings out the details of the mini and let's you know where all the shading details should be. It's like a guide coat for your placement of paint and highlights. Here is an example that I photographed earlier tonight.



You can see that when you do this the details of highlight and shadow really stand out. Take a look at the pants and the arms, also the highlights and shadows in the face are more defined to. This is a real dry brush to. There is barely any paint on it at all. It is even dryer than a dry brush would normally be. I actually used a bit to much paint for these.

Anyways now when I go to paint the actual colors onto the mini I will be able to make out the highlights that I want to accentuate while keeping brighter colors away from the shadows easily. I was taught this technique by an excellent top notch painter who probably would not want me to expose his name here. His technique is much more precise and expert than mine but I took what he taught me and have tried to batch paint with it. It has worked fairly well so far but the results are far from the master of this technique. You know who you are.

Anyway that sums up the basic steps I go through when starting a model. I will post more techniques as I go through the posts and may even post more tonight. I would not count on it though. I am going to bed soon. LOL. Thanks again for following the blog. I really appreciate it.

Good luck with that.

Your pretty screwed now you have base coated the models metallic.....

Youve gone a roundabout way of solving a problem that could also be solved by buying a nice desk lamp.

A good light source is all you really need to be able to pick out those details. Some even come with a moveable 'arm' with a magnifying glass on it. Id imagine you can find one at wally world for under 20$ and itll really come in handy for other projects too.

And it wont distort the layers of paint that come after like metallics will.

FreekyE wrote:Youve gone a roundabout way of solving a problem that could also be solved by buying a nice desk lamp.

A good light source is all you really need to be able to pick out those details. Some even come with a moveable 'arm' with a magnifying glass on it. Id imagine you can find one at wally world for under 20$ and itll really come in handy for other projects too.

And it wont distort the layers of paint that come after like metallics will.

Thanks for your opinion but I don't think it distorted the paint all that much. I will do one without the metal undercoat and see if it comes out any better. Here is one of the minis I did with the metallic undercoat.



I have a desklamp. I uses white light and I use it all the time. Do you think the paint was distorted by looking at this image?

surprisingly, the only really dodgy part i see on this is the face...


and the fact that its an ultramarine

but really, fine work

krusty wrote:surprisingly, the only really dodgy part i see on this is the face...


and the fact that its an ultramarine

but really, fine work

Thanks for your kind words. You are right about the face. It is dodgy and I need to clean that up at some point. I let the paint flow a bit to loose on him and the eyes are painted to big. It looks better in person but you can still see the errors around the eyepiece and the face. I does not worry to much though because I know I can make it better. If the metallics warp anything it's the flesh tones.

NOT when the good-looking color on

cheapman wrote:NOT when the good-looking color on

I am sorry but I don't understand. What are you trying to say?