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I was painting my Magnus model when I came to his cloth, I got out my smallest paint brush, mixed together a light blue and attempted to paint on the pattern on the bottom of the cloth and the mark of Tz in the centre.
God did it look awful. ):
I painted over it and left the cloth blank.

After this dissapointment I want to ask some of the more seasoned painters how do you free hand (or even keep inside the lines on a pattern)?

Althought I can't really show you anything to prove it, I start my Freehands with a very sharp pencil.
I'll just layout the Freehand as you would on a drawing. And if you want to test you can try diffrent shapes and Drawings on paper before you start drawing on your figure.


As you normally need a bit of space for that, it won't work on every figure. But even as small as SM shoulder pads will work. As for Magnus, I don't have the figure, but clothing will work, depending on the amount of Folds in it and how deep they are.
Then, after you applied the pencil you can go on and Outline the Drawing with you smallest brush and ,depending on the colour, with a very thin black.
After that you can start applying colours etc.

This may help you aswell (Good old Duncan ) as he goes over the basics of Freehanding:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyPsQ_mJgEA&t=12s

Hope it helped

Leaderlappen wrote:
Althought I can't really show you anything to prove it, I start my Freehands with a very sharp pencil.
I'll just layout the Freehand as you would on a drawing. And if you want to test you can try diffrent shapes and Drawings on paper before you start drawing on your figure.


As you normally need a bit of space for that, it won't work on every figure. But even as small as SM shoulder pads will work. As for Magnus, I don't have the figure, but clothing will work, depending on the amount of Folds in it and how deep they are.
Then, after you applied the pencil you can go on and Outline the Drawing with you smallest brush and ,depending on the colour, with a very thin black.
After that you can start applying colours etc.

This may help you aswell (Good old Duncan ) as he goes over the basics of Freehanding:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyPsQ_mJgEA&t=12s

Hope it helped

I'll give it a try! Just got to get a new detail paint brush, current one is a bit ragged.
Thanks.

Practice, practice, and more practice lol. Free handing can be very hard (depending on the picture), its very different from painting models, because you have no real guidelines except the ones you create for yourself. I do a simple outline with this down paint. Once I have a nice outline going I start to thickened the lines.

Leaderlappen wrote:
Althought I can't really show you anything to prove it, I start my Freehands with a very sharp pencil.

This is good advice, and basically what I do. Get a B pencil (soft, but not super soft) so as to not scratch the paint, put a fine point on it and draw what you want first. Paint INSIDE the lines and work out to the line. If you try to paint to the line right off, you'll paint over the line easily.

There is no real shortcut. Realistically - keep to simple designs that you know you can almost/sorta paint. Just be honest with your limitations. Practice over time and eventually you'll get better - I also second the idea of a fine tipped pencil for outlines.

Remember the KISS principle. A simple icon/logo done well looks 10x better than a fancy one done poorly.