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Was curious how people paint like the style and stuff below. Are they just that good at freehanding or do they cutout "stencils" and tape them on and paint/airbrush it? I really would like to do stuff like these..

Planning, Masking tape, and more time than I could ever justify. I've also heard of people using rubber/latex mold and painting it over the basecoat, then peeling it off once other effects are achieved.

That is good freehand, but something pretty much anyone could do with some care and patience. You just have to be happy to go over things several times to clean it up

usually something like that involves several hours of planning, painting dots/lines as guides, then painting the actual thing, then touching everything up.

its best to do an outline first in pencil of what you want painted which is what this guy might have done

Painting something like that over black (or a solid color in general) would be relatively simple. After the blue layer is down, you can use the black to go back over and "erase" areas to make the design or clean up mistakes.

The blending on the black/gray is the most difficult part of that particular mini. The blue would be pretty simple. Just paint and blend a solid stripe of blue in the shape/width desired, then just draw your swirls and swoops with a pencil. Once you have it how you like it, just go over it with black.

Chances are that, if you're good enough to achieve a nice, smooth transitional blend like that black to gray, you will be able to color in the lines for the black detail in the blue stripes.

*EDIT*
The more I look at this pic, the more I would like to see some close-ups. Many models look really good at arm's length. The hull on the turret look splender-r-r-rificly blended, but the hull (primarily the cockpit area) looks suspiciously like drybrushing. The blue doesn't appear to have any real blending anywhere.
Don't get me wrong, it's a very nice model. It's certainly above "tabletop quality". It just seems to have a 'wow-factor' that fades unter closer examination.

King Ghidorah

Some people who have infinate patience or are just freakishly skilled can do it free hand. I would also imagine that a airbrush would go a long way to acheiving something like this. If you want to see some crazy good painting skill check out anything by swich17

http://www.dakkadakka.com/core/gallery-search.jsp?u=39451

Flinty wrote:That is good freehand, but something pretty much anyone could do with some care and patience. You just have to be happy to go over things several times to clean it up

This, pretty much. Lots of people seem to think it takes a ton of skill to get clean freehand lines. It's more about patience and flexibility. Awesome lines rarely come from a single, brilliant stroke; awesome lines usually come from playing back and forth with the detail color and the base color, constantly adjusting to get the final line.

Ghidorah wrote:The more I look at this pic, the more I would like to see some close-ups. Many models look really good at arm's length. The hull on the turret look splender-r-r-rificly blended, but the hull (primarily the cockpit area) looks suspiciously like drybrushing. The blue doesn't appear to have any real blending anywhere.
Don't get me wrong, it's a very nice model. It's certainly above "tabletop quality". It just seems to have a 'wow-factor' that fades unter closer examination.

Got to run to work, so I can't look for you, but this thing cropped up a little while ago in the P&M Showcase forum, I believe, complete with closeups and multiple angles. You can barely catch a glimpse of it, but the heat bluing on the engines is quite impressive, as is the simplicity of the technique used to achieve it. The underside is a bit flat, for my tastes, but the painter explained that as a conscious decision, so as not to distract from the top designs. It's definitely worth taking a peek at the thread. Shouldn't be more than a page or two back, at this point.

Flinty wrote:That is good freehand, but something pretty much anyone could do with some care and patience. You just have to be happy to go over things several times to clean it up

And thin your paints down too! You'll get the gakky little places where things get painted over too much. I hate those :3

I'd be better at freehand if I actually slowed down and tried to think of it as artwork, not painting (you know?)

Looks like airbrushing for the black and then masking for the blue areas. I know there are some incredible freehand painters, but the lines and corners look way too sharp for that to be freehand.

The difference between a good painter and a bad painter is how much time you spend cleaning up mistakes. I'm guessing he masked it and spent quite some time going over and making sure there was no spillover.

It's a gallery pic. Click on it to be able to zoom in.

This reveals that it's freehand (and not particularly brilliant when viewed really close). You can tell by the wobbly lines and uneven blue. A masked / airbrushed job may be a bit speckly, but wouldn't have the roughness evident there.

Whether the design is marked out with pencil and a french curve, or just eyeballed is still debatable.

Edit: I'm old enough to remember using french curves in technical drawing - I guess it's an indicator on modern technology in design that it hadn't occurred to more people. Heh, kids at my son's school don't even know how to use set squares... scary.



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Brother SRM wrote:The difference between a good painter and a bad painter is how much time you spend cleaning up mistakes. I'm guessing he masked it and spent quite some time going over and making sure there was no spillover.

IMO, no. There are 2 differences. First is knowing what to do in the first place (from having made mistakes in the past), and the second is knowing how to fix things quickly (from having made *the same* mistakes in the past). Taking ages to fix something is a sign you did something badly wrong - this is why when doing freehand you build up the design with thin, easily corrected lines, and when spraying a masked area you use a 'dry' mix from your spray / airbrush.