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Okay, so I went to paint a blood angels space marine for the first time yesterday (been doing Crimson Fists for the past few months).

I started with an undercoat of scab red over grey primer. I then washed it with a mixture of leviathan purple and badab black (purple shades red awesomely).

I then layered on red gore.

Then I layered red gore:blood red 1:1.

I then layered pure blood red.

And it looks like garbage. It looks especially terrible on the shoulder pads. There are the obvious lines that are huge and I can never get a good gradation of colors unless I just do a glaze (for example, glaze enchanted blue over necron abyss for my crimson fists). I just can't ever get layering to look right. I tried washing it with baal red, glazing it to bring the colors together, etc... nothing helps. There is still like no color transition. Please help!!

When layering, your paint should be relatively thin, and your brush stroke should move toward where you want the colour to be strongest. Paint should flow from the brush, not run (so you want good brush control). A soft, flexible (ideally sable- I use W&N S7's for this) brush works best for avoiding brush strokes being visible. A glaze medium or similar additive can also help.
Allow each layer to dry before moving onto the next - this is the most common mistake. Attempting to paint over a wet layer will simply pull the paint away revealing the base colour and you'll get a nasty streak. A hairdryer is extremely useful here.

I think that's how I did it on the ones that came out good. I watered it down like 1:1 with water and pulled the pigments towards the highlights. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, this last round with my reds didn't go so well. It's like the paint was pure goop and did nothing but streak around. Maybe I didn't shake it enough? It seriously seemed like it was almost drying out or something. And then it dried REALLY funky. I was wondering - do you think the colors I used are too stark in transition? Maybe scab red washed black to red gore was too drastic a jump?

Pics would really help determine what's going on. If you could provide those it would probably help with the feedback... Winterdyne offered some good advice, some of which I'll echo - below.

1:1 paint to water is a little thick... I usually go somewhere around 5:1:1 water:paint:medium. Don't over-soak your brush either. Just take a little and maybe even dab it on your papertowel before applying it to the mini. When you brush the paint on, you should be able to see that stroke dry afterwards. Check out this CMON article on painting wings: http://www.coolminiornot.com/articles/5286-how-to-nmm-sanguinor The first video, 1:20 in, talks about thinning paints. At about 7:19 you'll notice he's blending colors and you can see how thin the paint is applied - you can actually see it drying shortly after his strokes. This is how you achieve a good transition with layering.

You're right that it might have been too much of a jump in your first layer... You might want to try going over the wash layer with another layer of your scab red then moving on. Also, each layer should be applied in 5-10 layers, slowly building up your transition from one color to the next, depending on how smooth you want the transition. This allows the colors to "blend" by allowing some of the previous color to show through (less and less as you apply more of the other layers).

Good luck! Post some pics and you'll get more specific advice.

5:1... that's what I use to glaze! Hmmm maybe I'm going about this all wrong lol. OMG revelation...painting break through!!!!! <3 u.

I agree 1:1 seems a bit thick. Maybe for a base layer, but (as you seem to have realized) when doing gradients you are going more for a glaze effect.

Also, you may want to consider washing the final product in a red gore wash. A final wash in the desired color range can really tie together disparate layers that may be a little to obvious otherwise.

Okay, so basically, I'll start with scab red, wash, maybe reapply scab red leaving the wash as a hard shadow, and then glaze up from there? Red gore, then a mix of red gore and blood red, then blood red, then blood red and blazing orange, and then I'll do my extreme edge highlights with blazing orange. The thing that is weird is on my Word Bearers, I layed down a base coat of P3 Sanguine Base, washed leviathan purple, then did a 1:1 layer of water:scab red, then scab red: red gore, then pure red gore, and washed Baal Red, and the transition is BEAUTIFUL. You can't even see any lines at all, and I Didn't do anything remotely close to glazing =/ I'm confuzzed. Maybe it's because they are dark colors that are so close together? thoughts? I'll def post pics later of the things I mean.


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2012-02-27_17.41.06 by thorn678, on Flickr

and
2012-02-27_17.42.42 by thorn678, on Flickr

I can't figure out how to upload them so you all see it without having to click on it =/


Automatically Appended Next Post:
bump... not sure why my last post wasn't updated...