Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Hey Folks,

How do people fade between colors? Nighthaunt I see this alot where it fades from say dark blue to green to white on their cloaks. Its very smooth and gradual. I've tried this a few ways and it comes out pretty terrible most times. The closest I've gotten is a more "drybrush" like technique; but that mostly hits the highlights too hard and is very "scuffy" on the lower parts of the model. I'm guess its airbrush work? Do you really need an airbrush for that affect? Any tips or videos folks know of for how to do this with or without an airbrush (prefferably without).

Airbrushing is the most efficient and noob friendly way.
If you can, you have to do multiple glazes to build up the color

There's a lot of different ways to do it. Airbrush is the easiest to get the transition, but I would always recommend being able to do it by hand. You can go back and touch up airbrush work, or add/accentuate it, etc.

You can drybrush blends. Use a makeup brush and very little paint. You won't, however, be able to avoid the texturing that naturally comes from drybrushing. Take a look at Bohun's work; he drybrushes a LOT of his work and you can see the texturing in his blend (which he has a tendency to hide by covering with a lot of freehand texture).

Sergio Calvo's method (the one I use primarily, although I can do the rest) involves blocking in your color steps without worrying about super smooth transitions, and then going back with an airbrush and super-diluted (think 10:1 or 15:1 water:paint ratio) filters to smooth out transitions.

You can layer it up by mixing in progressive amounts of a lighter color into your base to slowly work your way up.

Glazes of diluted paint to build up super thin coats of a paint works in the same concept as layering, just a different approach. You can also use glazes to work up or down, from dark to light, or light to dark.

You could also try wetblending directly on the surface, by taking both colors you want to blend between and just...smushing your brush around to get the fade. Hard to describe, easy to show. I don't like this because it's hard to do on large surfaces and often requires correction aftewards with glazes.

Honestly, just Youtube it. There's TONS of tutorials on how to do blends, and a lot of it is just practicing and integrating different techniques into what works for you.

Here's an example from Duncan while painting Nagash.

I second the suggestion of looking into wet blending, brush blending, more than anything it will be good experience and helping to get yo head around how paint behaves. Lots of great tutorials floating around.

One thing that everyone seems to agree on is practice makes perfect. Many many maaany hours of practice according to most respectable sources.

Many, many, many thin layers. Go from dark to light for the best transitions, and glaze between them.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Wet blending is an advanced technique and a massive pain. Learn to layer first.

I completely disagree with wet blending being an advanced technique. There's such a big stigma about it among miniature painters for reasons I cannot fathom - I think it just seems scary so people don't want to try it when they are starting out. I don't think there is any real reason why it can't be a beginner technique, it only takes a little practice to get passable results.

In terms of final result, blending is the only the real way to get airbrush-esque results (not to say that it is an inferior version of airbrushing - you can get a lot more contrast into a wet blend). Glazed transitions and particularly layered transitions are always visibly glazed or layer when you see it in the flesh. From arms length they can look perfect though, and are great looking techniques in themselves so it depends what you are after.

Wet blending and layering/glazing are also not mutually exclusive techniques; if you have a very rough looking attempt at a wet blend, once it is dry you can work over the top of it with layers to refine it.

I know Sam Lenz is big into wet blending and you can probably find some useful tutorials from his end. I would definitely recommend just jumping in and trying some blending if you haven't already; find a big flat panel from a tank or something and have a stab at it. The thicker your paint the easier it will be to blend; even if you have to cake it on so much that it looks awful, again it is worth giving it a try to get a feel for the technique. If you try to blend with the usual 'two thin coats' consistency of paint you will have a very hard time.

I can add my little experience on wet blending.
I got myself some harlequins and man did I learn a lot! How to do the diamond pattern and on the shadowseer I wanted the blended yellow to purple color so I looked into wet blending on YouTube and did my first attempt. I do not count myself as a good painter and I find it tedious too be frankly but man did it looked good! Dislike painting, first try at wet blending but did a really great work but I can not recommend to do it on a whole army as it takes more time but it’s not that hard if you take your time.

I will actually paint on of mine lord of change with this technique later when more pressing models are done because it can look great and I find it to be a good technique to at least try out.

Wow; yeah, this is a time consuming thing. In the video: "let it dry approximately 10 minutes between layers; we will now do 10 layers of that". Then for the top: same time between dries with 6 layers. 160 minutes in drying time; that is quite a lot of time.

It may be worth an airbrush just to save on that time and reserve that kind of blending for places an airbrush can't reach well.

Thoughts?

DrCrook wrote:
Wow; yeah, this is a time consuming thing. In the video: "let it dry approximately 10 minutes between layers; we will now do 10 layers of that". Then for the top: same time between dries with 6 layers. 160 minutes in drying time; that is quite a lot of time.

It may be worth an airbrush just to save on that time and reserve that kind of blending for places an airbrush can't reach well.

Thoughts?

Airbrush, wet blending and layering all yields different results.

I'd say getting perfect finish on layering is the most difficult due to precision required for accurate color mixture for each layer.
Wet blending has a bit of learning curve but it's not rocket science. Just a pot of water and few brushes.
Airbrush yields fastest results, but has the "artificial" look as well as lack of depth compared to the other two.

Airbrush however yields the best gradient on flat & large surfaces like tanks.

So practice each technique and to one's own.

Preface, I'm challenging your post, shmvo, not you. So please don't take this personally.

shmvo wrote:
I completely disagree with wet blending being an advanced technique. There's such a big stigma about it among miniature painters for reasons I cannot fathom - I think it just seems scary so people don't want to try it when they are starting out. I don't think there is any real reason why it can't be a beginner technique, it only takes a little practice to get passable results.

I will get to the stigma point in a bit.

There is a difference between being an advanced technique, and a technique that can be attempted by a beginner. A beginning technique, by definition, is something you learn at the start. The beginning. This has to be foundational knowledge and skills that are used to form the building blocks of more advanced knowledge and skills.

Things like how to dilute your paint. How to apply basecoats and washes. How to highlight and shade an object (the concept of light and shadow is, in my opinion, something that stretches from beginner to advanced to expert; there is so much nuance to learn that I don't want to break down here). Getting a feel for your brush and how to control it. At the very least a rudimentary understanding of paint pigmentation and how some colors are stronger or weaker (and how that impacts how they are applied, re: dilution, number of coats, how they interact with other colors, etc.) These are foundational tools that are true beginner techniques.

Wetblending isn't a beginner technique because you can't approach someone who's literally just beginning to get into the hobby and go "here, you can blend these two colors together by mixing them; you might need to dilute, you might not. Some colors blend easier than others". Approaching wet blending (or any other advanced technique) requires foundational knowledge.

Beginners can absolutely try advanced techniques; I often challenge them to, because that is how you grow as a painter. Experimenting and challenging yourself to become better by trying more and more advanced techniques, and combining them to find a methodology that works for you. Depending on each painter's skill/ability, some may pick it certain techniques more easily than others.

But I iterate again: just because an advanced technique can be attempted by a beginner does not make it a beginner's technique.

In terms of final result, blending is the only the real way to get airbrush-esque results (not to say that it is an inferior version of airbrushing - you can get a lot more contrast into a wet blend). Glazed transitions and particularly layered transitions are always visibly glazed or layer when you see it in the flesh. From arms length they can look perfect though, and are great looking techniques in themselves so it depends what you are after.

Contrast is the stark juxtaposition achieved by placing two strikingly different things side by side. I could paint a white square beside a black square and achieve high contrast without any airbrush, blending, or glazing. The result of high or low contrast is the result of applying theoretical knowledge, not the application of a technique.

And what does airbrush-esque results even mean? If we're talking about the perfect transition from one color to the next, you can use any technique to do that. Layering (takes a lot of layers and lots of subtle transitions). Glazing can do it (requires strong brush control and robust knowledge of paint behaviors and dilution ratios to avoid chalking). Wet blending can do it (also requires brush control, knowledge of paint behaviors and dilution ratios, etc.) It all comes down to skill and time.

I can achieve perfect transitions through all of these methods. But I prefer doing it some ways (glazing and airbrushing filters) over any other because it's efficient. I can glaze and achieve the same result in a fraction of the time it would take me to wet-blend, so why would I choose to wet-blend?

Wet blending and layering/glazing are also not mutually exclusive techniques; if you have a very rough looking attempt at a wet blend, once it is dry you can work over the top of it with layers to refine it.

This is about the only right thing you've said, and I would argue in fact that it's a trap to try and wet blend without going back with some layering/glazing to correct, purely from an efficiency point of view. Attempting to achieve something solely with wet-blending is a bit of mental masturbation; why bother? Block in an initial blend (if you really want to), and then use glazes to smooth it out. Who cares if you can perfectly wet-blend something, if someone else can achieve the same result in less time by using other techniques?

find a big flat panel from a tank or something and have a stab at it. The thicker your paint the easier it will be to blend; even if you have to cake it on so much that it looks awful, again it is worth giving it a try to get a feel for the technique. If you try to blend with the usual 'two thin coats' consistency of paint you will have a very hard time.

Ugh just...no. This is a bad way to learn to wet-blend, because you're trying to run before you walk. You learn bad habits if you learn to do something that produces bad results (caked on paint/chalky results), because the method to achieve them is by nature bad or wrong.

Two thin coats consistency is probably not the dilution you want to wet blend with, but you don't want to wet blend straight out of the pot, either. Blues, for example, have strong pigmentation, and trying to blend it into a Yellow or a White is asking for disaster without dilution.

And this all comes down to that foundational knowledge. If someone doesn't know how to dilute paints (and which paints/colors require more or less dilution) should probably focus on that before diving deep into developing their wet-blending technique.

There's such a big stigma about it among miniature painters for reasons I cannot fathom

Because it's about efficiency and results.

Something that many painters, particularly as you progress up the skill ladder into competition and display painting, very rarely start by beginning to paint parts of a model to completion. Many of us like to do what is known as "sketching", we block in basic colors with light and shadow very roughly (think of it as extreme layering, but very sloppy and messy) just to get a sense of how to compose a piece. We sketch because we don't want to commit to anything final; changes require no extra effort because we aren't finishing anything, so correcting doesn't mean covering up hours of wasted work.

It's as we refine and work and finalize a piece that we start from block ins, glazing and layering paint on top to achieve a final result. And very often, in the process of refinement, the way we work up the paint will naturally lend itself to smoother transitions anyways, so much so that wet-blending is redundant.

Starting with wet-blending means you're committing to finalizing that part. If you then realize that maybe the highlights and shadows are wrong, or that you used the wrong color for a piece, or that the values just aren't right and require a larger highlight area or a larger shadow area. Well all that time and effort to wet-blend the piece was wasted. You're either going to have to wet-blend the piece again, or spend more time layering and glazing the transitions back when really effort spent on a simple sketch, and then refinement would have been a more efficient use of time.

That's why, more often than not, many painters don't wet-blend. It's not that the results are bad. It's that, by the by, wet-blending is largely a waste of time that yields results that can be achieved by other means in a fraction of the time.

I thought I would check out ya'lls galleries just to see. @DV8; holy cow, that's some incredible work.

So, I'm looking essentially for advise on 2 things at the moment; perhaps ya'll can generally help. Keep in mind, I'm focusing primarily on AoS and just buying whatever appeals to me as a model or for the campaign with the kids.

1. Paint some stuff quickly so I can play some games with my kids and the models look better than the average bears. Minimum bar here is everything painted, shaded & highlighted within a general set of theme colors for the army(s). Some "advanced" techniques applied; in the case of the night haunt and fyreslayers or others.

2. Ability to do some super pro quality showcase pieces. I hadn't even thought of the realm of possibilities till I took a look at DV8's gallery. A new bar just got set for what I thought a pro paint job was; I'm gonna aim for that (yeah, it'll be a long journey).

I need to develop a bag of tricks and hone the skills in that bag of tricks. It would be cool to know what that bag of tricks is actually; because I'm probably one of those folks in the realm of not knowing what I don't know. Regarding specifically this topic of fading & blending -> It seems there are a few key options; for a beginner; any chance somebody can just lay out the various options and maybe pros and cons? Something like?

AirBrush
Pros: Smooth Transitions & Fastest approach
Cons: Takes a lot of practice to get into tight spots or small areas as well as the obvious up front investment.

Etc etc?

Anyways, thanks for ya'll taking the time to put all this info together. Its super helpful.

I recently got an airbrush, looking to improve.

For those of you who are saying an airbrush is the best way to blend, what's the technique on it?

The quick(est) and dirty shading/gradient for any level of painter is the three-color drybrushing - Base - midtone - highlight. The trick here is to pick a midtone that best ties to the final highlight. To take this method a step further, do a diluted wash of the midtone, then spot wash the crevice with base color (to recover some of the darker values) then do final touch up with your highlight color again. Done right, it would provide you with solid 5-tone gradient (base+base wash/base+midtone wash/midtone/highlight+midtone wash/highlight).

For most basic color schemes/gradients, the midtone can be achieved by mixing the highlight and the base color.

For high-contrast gradients (say, lilac to yellow, which yields amazing results on cloth), you want to use mid tone that's closer to the highlight and reserve the dark base as to prevent it from overwhelming the highlight.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

LeperColony wrote:
I recently got an airbrush, looking to improve.

For those of you who are saying an airbrush is the best way to blend, what's the technique on it?

Learning to control the intensity to let the colors below bleed through.

 skchsan wrote:


Learning to control the intensity to let the colors below bleed through.

So spray lighter at the blending edges so the colors overlap?

LeperColony wrote:

 skchsan wrote:


Learning to control the intensity to let the colors below bleed through.

So spray lighter at the blending edges so the colors overlap?

It's slightly more technical than that. I don't know the technical term for the technique as airbrush is something I picked up without someone teaching me how to use it - when you're practicing air brush strokes, you have to kind of 'flick' your stroke towards the end to prevent the tail end of the stroke to come out nice and smooth instead of looking like it ended abruptly.

It's a similar application of that - you have to control the distance & pressure of your paint to make the paint come out more 'dispersed'. To get a feel for it, put a blip of paint at about 1 inch to a surface, then another one next to it, but at about 3 inches away. Then, try one where you start at 1 inch from the surface then pull away as the paint is flowing to finish around 3 inches from the surface.

As I'm writing this, I feel like I'm confusing myself more than I am explaining.. but the point is, it's not about spraying lighter or harder, but to learning to make even stroke? Like a scratching motion.

Here's a better explanation of the technique I'm referring to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qU-Fe8K5ps @ 8:17

LeperColony wrote:
I recently got an airbrush, looking to improve.

For those of you who are saying an airbrush is the best way to blend, what's the technique on it?

Thinned paint..
Low to moderate air pressure (depends on brush and what it needs to achieve enough CFM for proper atomization)
Light Coats..

Pull up (over shoot your highlight goal as far as color hue-brightness)

Push down.(use the mid-tone and then the shadow to pull everything back down in stages) It may sound confusing but it isn't Airbrushes work best with translucent thin coats and wet vs dry color values may differ more than expected and because of translucency you get better and more smooth gradients by over-shooting and then pulling back down.

DrCrook wrote:I thought I would check out ya'lls galleries just to see. @DV8; holy cow, that's some incredible work.

Cheers!

So, I'm looking essentially for advise on 2 things at the moment; perhaps ya'll can generally help. Keep in mind, I'm focusing primarily on AoS and just buying whatever appeals to me as a model or for the campaign with the kids.

1. Paint some stuff quickly so I can play some games with my kids and the models look better than the average bears. Minimum bar here is everything painted, shaded & highlighted within a general set of theme colors for the army(s). Some "advanced" techniques applied; in the case of the night haunt and fyreslayers or others.

Games Workshop's painting method is actually REALLY effective and simple, especially for beginner hobbyists, to get a force of great looking miniatures on the tabletop at a reasonable speed. Their system takes advantage of the incremental steps of their paint range, and combines them with simple washes for easy shading. Their system amounts to, in summation, this:

Basecoat

First Highlight, which is really a slightly brighter basecoat on every surface except the deepest recesses, joins, and cracks between armor plates (as an example). Sometimes you can skip this step if the Basecoat color is bright enough.

Wash, where they apply a wash over the entire model(Agrax + Nuln + Lahmian Medium is a very nice mix that works on a lot of colors, although you can experiment with the new contrast paints and/or other wash combinations too)

Reapply Basecoat and/or First Highlight as necessary to touch up

Final Highlight, which is a lighter First Highlight, applied to the edges

Browse through WarhammerTV's Youtube account for a plethora of how-to's that outline this process. Once you get a feel for the methodology, it's just a simple matter of switching out colors and washes according to GW's paint system. Once you really master the process, you can start incorporating this process as a guide/template with paint ranges from other companies (should you so choose) and/or expand by incorporating other steps into the process.

The theory behind this process is simple. Establish your colors (basecoat and first highlight), work in the shadows (washes), and apply highlights (final highlight).

2. Ability to do some super pro quality showcase pieces. I hadn't even thought of the realm of possibilities till I took a look at DV8's gallery. A new bar just got set for what I thought a pro paint job was; I'm gonna aim for that (yeah, it'll be a long journey).

Lots of diligent practice. Maybe focus more on single models than armies. Painting armies or forces for tabletop are more about repetition and getting a playable army on the table where everything is a consistent quality. If you really want to learn new techniques and hone your skills, paint single models. I myself only put about 20-25% effort maximum to my tabletop pieces, but it also means I can finish my armies in a reasonable amount of time (especially because I have this habit of constantly starting new ones)!

I need to develop a bag of tricks and hone the skills in that bag of tricks. It would be cool to know what that bag of tricks is actually; because I'm probably one of those folks in the realm of not knowing what I don't know.

This is "tricky" in the sense that there's the potential for information overload which could lead to analysis paralysis. Very rarely is painting ever just one thing; techniques can and often are fluidly applied, which means it's often best to focus (at least in my experience) on one (remember, single models!), practice until you're absolutely comfortable with the technique, and then move on to learning the next.

Most of the techniques that painting masters do is just a combination of things like glazes, layering, wetblending, washes, whatever, which in turn is all based on strong foundations.

If I had to outline a learning process:

Brush control. You're not going to be able to do anything advanced if you don't know how to control your brush, how to get paint where you want it, keep it out of where you don't, and have an ability to really control and push the paint around in a behavior that is consistent and predictable. Really this is something you hone over time, but much like any physical activity, you start with something easy and work your way up to something complex. So focus on clean basecoats, controlled application of washes, clean highlights (using the edge of your brush as an example), etc.

Basecoats, Washes, Layering, Edge Highlights. Very fundamental stuff. Learn how to apply a clean basecoat. Experiment with different colors to understand how different color pigments will cover. Yellow, for example, has very weak coverage strength, and oftentimes needs to be worked up through darker base tones, whereas a Blue tends to be pretty strong. When you apply washes, learn to control the amount that you apply and how to prevent things like pooling from happening. Don't fire and forget (just slap it on the model), but play with pushing the wash around and focusing it where you want the shadows. Learning how to control your washes is the first step in learning how to effectively glaze and feather. Layering is just understanding how to work your way progressively up through colors to build up to a highlight, or work down to a shade. Here you're not only learning how to control placement of light and shadow, but you're also building an instinctual understanding of how many layers is required to get a visually seamless (or near to) transition. Smaller pieces might need less, larger pieces more. Here you might also be experimenting with color combinations, and it's giving you an opportunity to see how colors and paints interact to create more vibrant or more muted pastel colors. A sun-lit object, for example, might have stronger yellow highlights and so you mix a bit of ochre or cream into your color. How does that change it's properties? Layering and Edge Highlights is focusing your ability to control the brush, and you're going to find that it can be a bit sloppy at first, but that's okay. Many painters (myself included) embrace the sloppiness (you'll see below) and that can be a style preference. Banshee (Alphonso Giraldez) always says "f*** smoothness", and you often see it in the visceral texture of his work.

As you master those, it's worth getting (at the very least) an introductory understanding of color theory and how light and shadow behave. The basics of the color wheel, complementary vs contrasting vs tertiary colors (useful for developing color schemes), but also for understanding the emotions of colors (a red is vibrant, passionate, and builds excitement and focus for example, where a blue tends to be calmer, smoothing, and is often subconsciously pushed to the back by the mind). Understanding visual tricks of using contrasting colors (like red-green, blue-orange, purple-yellow, etc.) side by side convinces the eyes and brain that there's greater contrast than there actually is (Wikipedia Checker Shadow Illusion as a simple example).

Understanding how to properly apply light and shadow to the four fundamental shapes (cube, cylinder, sphere, and cone) will allow you to determine how to highlight and shade any piece, because everything is a combination of these four shapes. Understand that how we see an object is simply what light is being reflected at us, and understanding how this reflected light creates secondary and tertiary light sources that can impact objects around them.

Once you've mastered layering and the ability to control how you push paint around on a figure, work your way up to glazing and feathering. Learn to use diluted paints to start building up layers of color (see what I mean by fundamentals?) that create seamless transitions between color by feathering out the paint.




Here you can see on the robes how sloppy and messy my base colors are, because I'm working on establishing the placement of colors, lights and shadows. I'm less concerned with making the transitions perfect because I haven't fully established light, shadow, form, and volume yet. Making transitions with glazes afterwards is easy. If I worry about perfect transitions while I'm still determining the rest, if I get it wrong, I've wasted my time and have to redo ALL that work.




Boom. Look at that. Glazes by hand and airbrushing some filters and I end up with smooth transitions. Of course, I say "some". The amount of layers you put in and how smooth you make the initial transition will determine how much work you have to put in afterwards to smooth it out. The robes (from the waist through to where the ghosts start) in Step 1 (the first 2 images) probably took me 15-20 minutes. Step 2 (the next 2 images) was probably at least another 30 minutes.

Glazes are also useful for color filtering, subtly changing or injecting different colors into an object without necessarily working it into any of your base colors or highlights. This is very useful for nuancing pieces to help tie them together, or to add additional depth/contrast (remember that color theory? Pushing a bit of red into the shadows of a green object for example bumps up it's visual contrast because our brain is tricked into thinking it might often be darker than it actually is). It's also useful for metallic (Non-Metal-Metal or otherwise) objects where environmental reflections might bring different colors into the surface. Could you imagine trying to juggle making blends on a surface perfectly smooth while bringing it from grey to browns to purples or blues to white (say on a metallic blade?). Nightmare! Mastering glazes opens up a world of possibilities not only in being able to smooth out messy blends or transition colors, but allows you to really add depth and nuance to pieces for not a whole lot of work.

Niche techniques like wet-blending (and it's sub-set, two-brush blending) or loaded brush are very peripheral techniques that, in my opinion, can be good to know, but aren't essential in your toolkit. But that's because they're often just adding complexity to a workflow that could be easily achieved with any combination of the above. Wet-blending, for example, can be achieved with layers and glazes (see the Nagash example; could you imagine trying to wet-blend that model?), and particularly as surfaces get larger and more complex, layers and glazes is more versatile and consistent.

LeperColony wrote:I recently got an airbrush, looking to improve.

For those of you who are saying an airbrush is the best way to blend, what's the technique on it?

The simplest way is to basecoat and highlight your model with the airbrush. There's a million videos on Youtube that explain how, so it's easy to figure out. Best way is to just do it. The concept is the same as layering by brush. You start by spraying your initial color (first layer), and you mix in more of a brighter color to work up your highlights through progressive layers, covering less and less of the model with subsequent passes to achieve a blend.

This is what I mean by fundamentals; if you understand how to layer and work up/down highlights and shadows, then doing it by hand or by airbrush is all the same. The mechanics are different; you need to juggle dilution and flow with an airbrush, tweak PSI, distance, pressure and action (assuming dual action airbrush) which adds complexity (at first, but once you learn it, it becomes as easy as picking up a brush), but the fundamental concept remains the same.

This is why I also always advise people I instruct that if you can't do it by hand, focus until you can before you try to do it with an airbrush. Learning to cheat before you master the concept builds sloppy/poor habits and makes you a weaker painter.

The way I approach shading with an airbrush is by filters.

See the Nagash above.

I often basecoat with an airbrush to lay down a base color, simply to expedite the process especially when batch painting for armies or on a big model like Nagash. But from there I go in with a brush to really rough in my light and shadow, determine what my color palette is, and develop the form of the piece. I'm less concerned with smooth transitions than I am with perfecting where the colors will end up going.

I then go back in with a brush or airbrush (spraying very diluted paint, 10-15 parts water to 1 part paint) and "filter" over (areas to smooth the transitions in between. For example, if I have colors A and B side by side, I might go in with a glaze or airbrush filter of A and B mixed together in equal parts to create a transition tone. I do this repeatedly until the transition between color layers is seamless.

Oftentimes I'll go in and add extra colors for variety as well. Nagash, for example, as some crimson and purple that I've pushed into the shadows as well to create an extra level of richness and nuance.

Holy smokes! Great couple of posts DV8

Its been awesome getting an explanation of your processes and the breakdown of these concepts and a get a glimpse into your thinking.
I have been a big fan of your work sir!

DV8, you always impress with your mastery of the concept of painting for how the brain sees.

That is, if you zoomed really far in some of his work wouldn't make any sense. Anymore than if you zoomed really far into my digital art. But as a whole the effects of gloss, reflection, color and hue are inferred to the eye and the overall result that such achieves is vastly beyond any kind of artistic result that one might try to get by making a "perfect line" as it were.

DV8 has mastery. It is gloriously obvious in his work. It is pleasant on the eyes and the mind.

 DV8 wrote:
Preface, I'm challenging your post, shmvo, not you. So please don't take this personally.

shmvo wrote:
I completely disagree with wet blending being an advanced technique. There's such a big stigma about it among miniature painters for reasons I cannot fathom - I think it just seems scary so people don't want to try it when they are starting out. I don't think there is any real reason why it can't be a beginner technique, it only takes a little practice to get passable results.

I will get to the stigma point in a bit.

There is a difference between being an advanced technique, and a technique that can be attempted by a beginner. A beginning technique, by definition, is something you learn at the start. The beginning. This has to be foundational knowledge and skills that are used to form the building blocks of more advanced knowledge and skills.

Things like how to dilute your paint. How to apply basecoats and washes. How to highlight and shade an object (the concept of light and shadow is, in my opinion, something that stretches from beginner to advanced to expert; there is so much nuance to learn that I don't want to break down here). Getting a feel for your brush and how to control it. At the very least a rudimentary understanding of paint pigmentation and how some colors are stronger or weaker (and how that impacts how they are applied, re: dilution, number of coats, how they interact with other colors, etc.) These are foundational tools that are true beginner techniques.

Wetblending isn't a beginner technique because you can't approach someone who's literally just beginning to get into the hobby and go "here, you can blend these two colors together by mixing them; you might need to dilute, you might not. Some colors blend easier than others". Approaching wet blending (or any other advanced technique) requires foundational knowledge.

Beginners can absolutely try advanced techniques; I often challenge them to, because that is how you grow as a painter. Experimenting and challenging yourself to become better by trying more and more advanced techniques, and combining them to find a methodology that works for you. Depending on each painter's skill/ability, some may pick it certain techniques more easily than others.

But I iterate again: just because an advanced technique can be attempted by a beginner does not make it a beginner's technique.

In terms of final result, blending is the only the real way to get airbrush-esque results (not to say that it is an inferior version of airbrushing - you can get a lot more contrast into a wet blend). Glazed transitions and particularly layered transitions are always visibly glazed or layer when you see it in the flesh. From arms length they can look perfect though, and are great looking techniques in themselves so it depends what you are after.

Contrast is the stark juxtaposition achieved by placing two strikingly different things side by side. I could paint a white square beside a black square and achieve high contrast without any airbrush, blending, or glazing. The result of high or low contrast is the result of applying theoretical knowledge, not the application of a technique.

And what does airbrush-esque results even mean? If we're talking about the perfect transition from one color to the next, you can use any technique to do that. Layering (takes a lot of layers and lots of subtle transitions). Glazing can do it (requires strong brush control and robust knowledge of paint behaviors and dilution ratios to avoid chalking). Wet blending can do it (also requires brush control, knowledge of paint behaviors and dilution ratios, etc.) It all comes down to skill and time.

I can achieve perfect transitions through all of these methods. But I prefer doing it some ways (glazing and airbrushing filters) over any other because it's efficient. I can glaze and achieve the same result in a fraction of the time it would take me to wet-blend, so why would I choose to wet-blend?

Wet blending and layering/glazing are also not mutually exclusive techniques; if you have a very rough looking attempt at a wet blend, once it is dry you can work over the top of it with layers to refine it.

This is about the only right thing you've said, and I would argue in fact that it's a trap to try and wet blend without going back with some layering/glazing to correct, purely from an efficiency point of view. Attempting to achieve something solely with wet-blending is a bit of mental masturbation; why bother? Block in an initial blend (if you really want to), and then use glazes to smooth it out. Who cares if you can perfectly wet-blend something, if someone else can achieve the same result in less time by using other techniques?

find a big flat panel from a tank or something and have a stab at it. The thicker your paint the easier it will be to blend; even if you have to cake it on so much that it looks awful, again it is worth giving it a try to get a feel for the technique. If you try to blend with the usual 'two thin coats' consistency of paint you will have a very hard time.

Ugh just...no. This is a bad way to learn to wet-blend, because you're trying to run before you walk. You learn bad habits if you learn to do something that produces bad results (caked on paint/chalky results), because the method to achieve them is by nature bad or wrong.

Two thin coats consistency is probably not the dilution you want to wet blend with, but you don't want to wet blend straight out of the pot, either. Blues, for example, have strong pigmentation, and trying to blend it into a Yellow or a White is asking for disaster without dilution.

And this all comes down to that foundational knowledge. If someone doesn't know how to dilute paints (and which paints/colors require more or less dilution) should probably focus on that before diving deep into developing their wet-blending technique.

There's such a big stigma about it among miniature painters for reasons I cannot fathom

Because it's about efficiency and results.

Something that many painters, particularly as you progress up the skill ladder into competition and display painting, very rarely start by beginning to paint parts of a model to completion. Many of us like to do what is known as "sketching", we block in basic colors with light and shadow very roughly (think of it as extreme layering, but very sloppy and messy) just to get a sense of how to compose a piece. We sketch because we don't want to commit to anything final; changes require no extra effort because we aren't finishing anything, so correcting doesn't mean covering up hours of wasted work.

It's as we refine and work and finalize a piece that we start from block ins, glazing and layering paint on top to achieve a final result. And very often, in the process of refinement, the way we work up the paint will naturally lend itself to smoother transitions anyways, so much so that wet-blending is redundant.

Starting with wet-blending means you're committing to finalizing that part. If you then realize that maybe the highlights and shadows are wrong, or that you used the wrong color for a piece, or that the values just aren't right and require a larger highlight area or a larger shadow area. Well all that time and effort to wet-blend the piece was wasted. You're either going to have to wet-blend the piece again, or spend more time layering and glazing the transitions back when really effort spent on a simple sketch, and then refinement would have been a more efficient use of time.

That's why, more often than not, many painters don't wet-blend. It's not that the results are bad. It's that, by the by, wet-blending is largely a waste of time that yields results that can be achieved by other means in a fraction of the time.

you basically explained what I was too lazy to explain.

While we're talking learning blending, you mentioned chalkiness, is that usually too much or not enough dillution, or some other issue entirely? And how would you fix it?

Too much dilution. Chalkiness is a result of the pigment over-separating from the medium. That's what the chalkiness is coming from: paint pigment clumping up because there's less medium to spread it's goodness around.

I would reduce your dilution, perhaps experiment with either adding more medium as part of the dilution process, and/or injecting either more transition steps in between.

Thank you-- I'll have to play with the process more. Anything to do to fix it once it occurs, or textures on now, not much to be done?

Depends on how thick the chalkiness. If there's a texture, then you'll have to sand down the surface and repaint.

If it's just a matter of flecks of color here and there, I'd go back in with a glaze that's a step or two darker than the one you just applied and glaze over the area few times. Here you're adding a bit more of that slightly darker pigment to cover it up and knock back the strength of the chalky pigment, before going back up again with your highlight.

If you see the paint start to chalk and separate as you apply the paint, just use your brush to quickly remove or at the very least spread the offending pigments. You might not be able to remove/hide it all, but you can minimize the damage, making it easier to correct.

What are ya'll diluting / thinning your paints with? I'm using vallejo game color and have just been using water to thin them which seems to work alright enough.

The vallejo kit I bought has 3 varnishes and a glaze medium. I'm not entirely sure what those are for yet. I'm assuming the glaze medium is for "glazing".

I need to find some good youtube videos on these basic concepts.

Glaze medium allows you to turn regular paints into glazes to smooth out your transitions, although once you get to a certain point you can generally acheive this using water. I use water for everything. Mainly down to laziness.

DrCrook wrote:
What are ya'll diluting / thinning your paints with? I'm using vallejo game color and have just been using water to thin them which seems to work alright enough.

The vallejo kit I bought has 3 varnishes and a glaze medium. I'm not entirely sure what those are for yet. I'm assuming the glaze medium is for "glazing".

I need to find some good youtube videos on these basic concepts.

Water is generally fine. There was another discussion few months back about someone claiming you can't improve your skills as a painter if you don't use mediums & wet palette - it's a load of bologna.

However, do note that once you've gotten a grasp of the particular qualities of different mediums (i.e. flow improver, medium (gloss or matte), water, etc) they can be used to achieve a particular effect/finish which otherwise would be hard to replicate using another medium.

I do like lamian medium from citadel however - particularly when used with citadel metallics for base layer. I haven't found another medium that behaves similarly or better with metallic paints yet. So if you're going down that route with experimenting with different mediums, I highly recommend it.

Yeah, so I'm using Vallejo metalics and I find that if I don't thin them, I get thick nasty layers. If I thin them with water, I just get garbage coverage and big streaks.

Specifically, I'm giving the evil eye at the polished gold from vallejo. Now I'm able to make it look good by washing it with soft tone and then thinning the gold and hitting it quickly dry brush style after words, but it would be nice to be able to just get a great application without that necessary.

Just to be overly "technical" water isn't really a paint medium, depending how you want to use the word. People often use the word "medium" to mean all sorts of things. It's always good to try to dispel some ambiguity, if possible though.

As far as I know, paint is three things, pigment, medium, solvent. Pigment, basically, is the color, medium is the thing that binds the pigment both to itself and to what it's applied to (cohesion and adhesion), and the solvent is what keeps it as a liquid (i.e. not a solid).

There are other things that do often get added to paint, such as surfactants (flow-aid, i.e. something to reduce the surface tension) or fluid retarder (i.e. something to inhibit solvent evaporation), but these are things that mostly just change solvent behavior.

In most acrylic paint, you have the colored pigment, acrylic resin of some sort as the medium, and water as the solvent. So, if you "thin" something with water, you have the same amount of "medium" (binder) and "pigment" (color) just more solvent, to made the whole mixture more diffuse since once the water (the solvent) evaporates, the medium and pigment are spread "more thinly" over a given area. What this can sometimes cause though, is cases where the medium is too thin and does not do a "good job" binding the pigment. That can be "chalkiness" or something like that.

Adding more "medium," that is, binder, which in our usual case is an acrylic resin, which is almost always transparent, can help "smooth" a paint out, because more binder means more "body" in which to "hold" the pigment. Vallejo's Glaze Medium is not just acrylic resin though, like the name suggests, it has some surfactants (and likely some solvent) mixed in. This is to give a "glaze" consistency, i.e. "thinner" but also somewhat more "transparent" which is what many people find suitable for a layering technique. Why not just water? Well, again, to return to the theory, we don't want to "stretch" the binder to the point where is does not do a good job binding any more.

Now, all that is very technical and in real life the differences can be subtle and small. Still, there is difference. All in all, it depends on what you are looking to do, how you want to do it, and to what extent. I guess though that it's just my nature to try to make things more succinct if I can.

DrCrook wrote:
Yeah, so I'm using Vallejo metalics and I find that if I don't thin them, I get thick nasty layers. If I thin them with water, I just get garbage coverage and big streaks.

Specifically, I'm giving the evil eye at the polished gold from vallejo. Now I'm able to make it look good by washing it with soft tone and then thinning the gold and hitting it quickly dry brush style after words, but it would be nice to be able to just get a great application without that necessary.

There is a school of thought that you really should not "need" to thin metallics. In real life, most are just not good paints and you do. The problem is, like you say, the result in thinning them is often pretty poor.

In reality, it's better to just use better metallic paint. Vallejo Metal Color, while it does not have a "great" Gold, is really good and really does not need to be thinned in most cases. Scale 75's metallics are good and usually don't, but they are not as good as the Metal Color series. GW's metallics are pretty poor in comparison, from my experience, and the Vallejo Game Color ones are even worse.