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Been hearing about painting minis using mostly wash. How is this done, any tips or tricks?

I have a project that needs to be different from my usual style and I tend to do a lot of drybrushing and highlighting. I'm wondering if I can go the opposite route and start light and darken with multiple washes.

Anyone else tried it this way, start light then build up the shades with wash?

this might take a while to read through.... but weety has exactly what you are looking for...

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/315548.page

and she does it brilliantly....

I often paint with washes or very thinned paints.

I undercoat a mid grey, then spray a white primer from above to give pre-shading and highlights.

Then just paint as you normally would with washes, inks, and suitably watered down paints.

I often use the technique of having a white undercoat and then using heavily watered down paints and washes to build the shades (I don't ONLY use washes, to get a bit more colour depth I usually start with a white undercoat followed by a paint that's watered down to a consistency slightly thicker than a wash).

I primarily use that method when speed painting.

I wrote this step-by-step with Skinks.


For anyone interested, here's a quick step-by-step on how to paint the skinks....
White spray undercoat, spray is important as paint spreads better over a spray than a hand painted white, also I've used white as you can paint watered down paints on to it and the white acts as a highlight.


Paint the scales with a mix of Liche purple and black. Use it heavily watered down, and you'll get the "highlighted" look. Dont water it down so much that it becomes like a wash, you still want decent coverage, just not perfect coverage. (3 minutes per model)



Paint the skin using a light purple, this was around 2 parts Bleached Bone 1 part Liche Purple. Again, water it down to get a bit of shading rather than a solid color. (6 minutes per model)



Give both the skin and scales a generous wash with Leviathan Purple. Make sure you coat the entire model quickly using a big brush, I use a 10mm flat brush (around 7/16"), then before it dries use a finer brush to manipulate the wash (prevent it pooling on flat areas and guide it into some of the smaller crevices that the wash may not have naturally fallen into). Also by using a big brush, the wash will go on more evenly than if you tried to use a finer detail brush. Dont worry about accidently getting the wash on the other parts of the model, we're gonna repaint those bits anyway, the goal here is just being fast and neat. (2 minutes per model).



For all of these use a big brush to speed things up. Its important when using watered down paints and washes like this to get the entire model painted before the paint starts to dry too much. If you try to manipulate a half-dried paint or accidently go over the same area twice after its dried slightly, you'll end up with something very blotchy looking. So when painting the scales or the skin I use a big brush initially then quickly swap to a smaller brush to do details which were too fine to do with the big brush (swap brushes quickly so the paint doesn't have a chance to dry, I dont try and clean the brushes when swapping, I just dump them in the water then clean both the brushes once I'm finished with the given colour). Even be a little bit careful how you hold the model, if you have the model upside down when washing and have a big pool, when you turn it right side up the pool will shift and if its half dry it'll leave an ugly circular ring. Obviously you might need to turn the model upside down to reach certain parts, but be aware that deep pools of paint can shift and create blotchiness if you aren't careful.

Some other models I painted using a similar technique. They're not perfect, some look better than others, but as far as speed painting goes, I think it's a great technique to get good results fast.

90% wash Nids, white base, black carapace dry brushed grey. Everything else done through layered washes:

A lot of Nid players use a wash to paint the main body. Hell, I bet you could make Ork Nids with the right shades.

Very good examples!

Thanks for the skink tut this will probably be how I do it.

I'm painting Nurgle Marines and want to do something different than the standard green rot.

I think if I start with white, or grey and build up the greens I'll get the pale sickly colour I'm looking for. Also I want to incorporate that nice bone colour GW makes, starts with a U...


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Not too terribly concerned about speed. Though I did get 90% of my sculpting done in under 2 hours last night!

Apparently sculpting bloated disgusting crap onto a CSM is pretty darn easy!

Theres some awesome paint jobs in this thread guys, nice work. I plan to have a focus on using thin layers of paints and/or washes for my first army (hopefully I won't mess it up too bad!) and this has helped me with working out just how I'll do it. Cheers!

I found a good basic method is just to start with light paints that are thicker so only the raised areas have white showing through and work your way down to thinner paints to do the shades. That way you get a nice strong colour that doesn't look overly pale.

Unless of course you are aiming for something that looks pale, in which case stick to very thin paints like washes to give everything a faded look.

Army painter makes a dip shade... it looks like a small pint of stain. You literally just basecoat and.. wait for it to dry and then dunk... doesnt come out as good as using specific shades for certain colors.. and layering and highlight... but its a ton faster.

 Snoopdeville3 wrote:
Army painter makes a dip shade... it looks like a small pint of stain. You literally just basecoat and.. wait for it to dry and then dunk... doesnt come out as good as using specific shades for certain colors.. and layering and highlight... but its a ton faster.

I'd content that it's not actually a ton faster. If you're applying your wash with an appropriate sized brush (as large as is practical) then the washing stage only takes a couple of minutes per model anyway.

Slightly faster? Maybe. A ton faster? I don't really think so, across an entire army it might save you an hour or two.

The most time consuming parts when I use the wash method is laying down the base layers (which are time consuming either way) and cleaning mould lines off the model (which needs to be done either way).

I do think dipping is a bit over rated. IMO the time saving versus a method that has better control is small in the overall scheme of putting an army together.

What Skink said!

Plus those dips are like $20. That's a far cry from the $3 I pay for a dropper bottle...

Plus thinning paint with water works just as well. I've even got a couple PMs that I've washed already with watered down paint and they seem to look okay.

That being said I never did scrape the mould lines, or at least not all of them. I just can't be bothered to get them all...

Mould lines are annoying. On models that I just want to paint quickly to play with, I will admit I don't really care about mould lines if they aren't removed.... BUT using the wash method to paint models, the mould lines stand out REALLY badly because the wash will accumulate along the mould line and make it stand out even more.

So in an odd paradox, when I'm speed painting models I take time to clean off mould lines because if I don't they'll stand out more when I wash them. As such, cleaning mould lines is probably the most time consuming step of speed painting a model