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Alright, I'm not very good at painting. So far, I've only painted two marines and a dreadnought (and they came out looking pretty well), but for the life of me I cannot get a good result on the helmet of a terminator. I'll lay out my problems:

1. I can't paint white. No matter how hard I try, it always comes out looking uneven and blotchy. I even based it with Codex Gray beforehand, and it still looked pretty terrible.

2. I CANNOT blackline. I tried and... oh god. I ended up with black ink EVERYWHERE. I seriously do not think I physically have the hand-eye coordination required to blackline all those tiny details. Or my brush was too big. I tried doing it with a brush (a relatively small one), do I need a pen?

I always find drybrushing works and then bring out the details on lines on the helmet plates then do eyes etc etc.

Maybe try another colour? You're not bound to using white.

Basecoat with the darker color, then ink, then midtone color, then highlight.
you can do everything you need to do with a #1 brush if you have good brush control.

And as for white you may want to look into getting some floaid from liquitex it will even out the paint application a bit.

I guess I don't HAVE to paint it white. But just for future reference, how DO you get white to look good? Like in official 'Eavy Metal miniatures?

Multiple thin coats I guess.

Yea, multiple thin coats for sure. White and yellow are real pains when done decently. Thin down your paint quite abit first. Make sure you test it out on some paper towel or that mini everyone has painted about 60 times and never bothered to give it a super clean bath.

Anyways, Also what you could try is to get a coat or two down, and then make a white wash, and wash the rest of it. Thatll help fill in the "blotchy" parts. Really this is one of those colors that takes more then some practice to get down right. Good luck man

Black lining with a brush is also a real pain. All of my friends and I use micron pens with tip size ranging from .05 to .01. The .05 pen makes a .2 mm wide line, which is just about perfect for black lining.

If you use a pen, it is really easy and fast to black line a head, or just about anything that needs to be black lined.

Alright, thanks guys. How much should I thin it, exactly? 50/50?

Also, I was thinking about painting the face with a (thinned) coat of Codex Gray, then drybrushing white. Would that look terrible, or good? Aaaand, can someone link me to a nice micro pen that I could buy?

BobTheChainsaw wrote:I guess I don't HAVE to paint it white. But just for future reference, how DO you get white to look good? Like in official 'Eavy Metal miniatures?

They cheat. Seriously.

When they paint white over black, they use the following stages:
1)The part to be painted white is basecoated with Fenris Grey.
2) The part is then given a 50/50 mix of Fenris Grey and Astronomicon Grey.
3) Flat Astronomicon Grey is then painted on.
4) 75/25 mix of Astronomicon Grey and Skull White is then painted on.
5-7) The mix is gradually altered until it's been both a 50/50 and 25/75 mix in reverse(75% Skull White, 25% Astronomicon Grey).
A really, really, REALLY watered down wash of Badab Black is then applied and voila. There you go.

A quick and easy way of getting white is to just use 3 coats of watered down (so that it just starts to flow like water instead of syrup) Dheneb Stone. Against most other GW colours, it looks white. Then you can either lowlight with Badab Black in the corners of the detail, or highlight the edges with Skull White (or both).
And always use a detail or fine detail brush for miniatures, the only thing the standard brush is good for is tanks.

I personally find Skull White to be one of the poorest quality paints that GW do, it's very grainy and is a pita to get a decent finish with.

Check out my Sternguard for how Dheneb Stone works with other colours: