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I am working on painting a 1/8th scale female ninja. She is wearing a fishnet/chainmail looking material under the clothing that is seen on parts of her arms and legs. I am looking for techniques and help on airbrushing/painting them since they are over bare skin. Normally something like that I would do a base layer color first, then lighter colors, highlight and drybrush. Even though the material is raised to give it a chainmail/fishnet look, I could dry brush but it isn't as effective. Cleanup is a lot harder because of all the small dips if needed. Dry brushing also doesn't look right. I could probably try lightly brushing and painting the chainmail part with black but considering the mesh is close together even at 1/8th scale, it isn't that easy.

Does anyone have any ideas and tips they can pass on to help with this?

Here are a couple examples. One may be considered [NSFW] but there is no nudity. These are not what I'm painting but it gives better examples of what I am talking about trying to paint.

Small brush, lots of time and care.

Paint the flesh first. Then carefully handpaint all the chain link.

Got pics of the model?

sounds like a hand painting job.

If it is raised details i think you could get away with hand painting the lines and glazing over it to get the difference in tone. ( prime white, paint in the lines black, then glaze over with your flesh tone.)

 Desubot wrote:
Got pics of the model?

At work currently so I don't have pics right now but this is the piece I'm working on. It is a resin kit that is getting kit bashed with some other piece. The part that is being painted currently is the torso piece. One method is to make the chainmail look like chainmail, except they took the easy way and kept everything silver.



The other example could be considered [NSFW]. This person did a skin tone underneath, looks like they dry brushed the chain part but it looks sloppy. I'm not particularly talking about their model when I say that, it just looks sloppy on the piece I'm working on. Further away it looks fine but the closer you get it looks really bad. So I've stripped it back down to repaint that piece multiple times but can't seem to get it to a degree of where I'll like it... at least without going the easy route and making it all one color (like above), then wash/drybrush over instead of making it look like it is on skin.

you could try undercoating the mini with a black, using a piece of really fine mesh material, stretch it over the mini to act as a stencil, and airbrush the skin tones onto it. If that's an option for you

erratyk wrote:
you could try undercoating the mini with a black, using a piece of really fine mesh material, stretch it over the mini to act as a stencil, and airbrush the skin tones onto it. If that's an option for you

I belive the details are actually raised on the model so its not like he is trying to paint on mesh.

looks like the model picture is broken atm.

 Desubot wrote:
I belive the details are actually raised on the model so its not like he is trying to paint on mesh.

looks like the model picture is broken atm.

Once I'm done stripping the paint from it again, I'll take some pictures. I've fixed the image link.

I think you will be stuck hand painting the net.

Airbrush the skin tones > Then hand paint the lines (edge highlighting)

Probably a mixture of the skin tone and black/grey to help blend it in a bit.

Drybrushing will probably get way messy.

I was afraid of that... guess that means I get lots of practice.

Out of curiosity Dark Severance, because it's so rare to see people painting miniatures like this, what is the model / where did you get it?

Looking at some different methods for edge highlighting. I wonder if I could cheat a bit. Airbrush black primer, a couple thin layers of black base. Then airbrush back over with a thin white, so that I can airbrush the skintone. Then use a small triangle tipped que tip with alcohol to brush the color away until we get back to the black layers. It would be easier to quetip the raised parts vs painting individual lines.

I will probably end up having to do it the normal way though.

One thing you could try ... experiment first ... is to paint the chainmail and then drybrush/sponge a masking fluid over the top. Once that's dry, spray and wash your fleshtones, then remove the masking fluid.