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Hey folks,
I have an emblem I want to put on an Ork stompa's belly. Do you folks have any tricks for freehanding? Or transferring something from paper to model?
DrG
Thanks.

I am terrible with a brush. I have a hard time doing even a simple lightning bolt on a shield for my marines, BUT...

I got myself a micron pen, some advice I heard from some folks here. It was a few bucks online, like a 2.0, darn I don't remember, but it is basically a very small sharpie, they make many colors.

I use it to draw out a lot of shapes, and well all of my ork checks, my space marine company numbers, etc. , which helps a bit since I suck at art-like drawing or whatever.

It really helps. As far as brush work, I'll leave that to someone else, but as far as me being a very bad artist, the micron pens work well.

Free handing for orks should be quite easy. When I freehand things, I cover up any little mistakes with wear, rust or paint chip effect.. Lazy? Maybe ;-)

It can help to lightly sketch the design directly onto the model's surface (a soft pencil is easier to cover than black marker, if you aren't using dark colors), to guide the painting. If the surface is a relatively simple shape, you may be able to cut out a stencil of your design and use that for a perfect shape transfer. Assuming that the emblem is large, given its placement, you can break down the design into multiple stencils for different colored elements, giving yourself a full "paint by numbers" sketch to work from. Makes blocking in the basic color(s) about as easy as it will get.

Best advise I can give is to apply the design with techniques working with layers built up from the basic shapes of your design and there negative space.
Apply the bottom most layer/background colour first, then apple the next shapes colour over that, you can then use the first colour to neaten up any mistakes, make sharper edges, thin out lines and shapes that are impossible with single brush strokes, continue this method up to the very top/fine layer of your design and you should have a much more refined image then when just trying to block in colours or draw on your design with a brush.

I hope this helps - it always helps me trying to paint tiny picks on space marines cloths and the like. XD

Well, on a stompa belly i imagine you want a fairly large image. Usually it starts being difficult for me when i start putting detail in something less than 1/2" diameter, and i have fairly shaky hands.

Ork decals would be easy as they wont paint any clean and crisp images...it would be more of an ork throws a bucket of paint for the bulk of the icon and then uses an umies' head on a stick to brush "finer detail" lines, using their hair as a brush lol.