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Just painted my first (well first one i've done seriously) model, and wanted some opinions and feedback on it, dont expect it to be great, but gotta start somewhere!

https://imgur.com/a/80djETL

You're doing a decent job of painting neatly and keeping things "in the lines" so that's a good start.

Biggest tip: You have got to thin your paints. I'm sure you can see that your model has a chalky texture all over it, this comes from trying to paint directly out of the bottle onto the miniature and trying to get opacity in one thick coat. Thin your paints so that you can apply them without any buildup or loss of detail, and apply multiple thin coats if the color doesn't cover. This alone will drastically improve your painting.

Past that it's all about adding shading and highlights.

Thanks for the reply! and the feedback, I see what you mean yes and ill keep this in mind for the future!

Its not a bad start, A few pointers though;
Clean the model thoroughly before assembly, where the model connects to the sprue or where the mould leaves lines need to be cleaned up before undercoating. (In the first pic you can see the sprue vents on the helmet for example).

Multiple thin coats of paint are better than one thick one.

When you finish doing an area go back over any slops you have made to adjoining areas, though with practice your brush control becomes fine enough that you wont make as many/any.

Its hard to tell with the lighting but did you highlight the black? In places it looks like you have just left undercoat, if so paint over the undercoat even if its the same colour (ie. black) to get a solid basecoat and then highlight it.

Hope that's of some use to you.

its alot of help! thanks

When I began painting I used an oil wash that worked out quite well for me. Wash would hide a lot of mistakes and brought out the sculpted detail.
I would take like about 4-5 table-spoons of oderless terpenoid or mineral spirits and mix Oil Raw-Umber dab of paint into it. Making a watery grainy brownish wash, (very very transparent - light on pigment) and just coat my mini with it.

The mineral-spirit solvent wont pool like water does and will deliver the pigment into the tiniest of crevasses.

Do a Oil-based wash test run on something else to see how it works. I used primed army men.


Later I tried to applying good-ol Oil based Wood-Stain to a finished model. It would have similar application process to the Oil-base wash, but would dry shiny and lacquered. But I still liked the way it got into tiny cracks and brought out the sculpted detail.
Again, test run it first



And Ultimate tip is to position your hand that is holding the mini, and the hand that is holding the brush, firmly and comfortably on a solid surface to have the optimal stability, especially for the details. Think of it this way. When writing a letter you have both hands on table solid, and only use fingers to move the pen or pencil. Trying to paint a mini with both hands not grounded is like trying to write in cursive without hard surface.

That is my approach. I hope it made sense.
And the most important part is not how good your paint job is, but how much are you enjoying the process! ! !

One way to tell if your paints are thin enough: If the first coat looks really crappy, with weak spots, it's about right. Let it dry and you will be amazed what the second coat does.

light yellow on black is really hard. Try a grey base coat first.

So ive just painted my Warp Hunter, and would like feedback on this one too;

https://imgur.com/a/ijXv28r

Picture is not the best, sorry about that

I tried to think my paints out more, And i also tried using masking tape when painting one specific place to try and not get as much accidentally on the surrounding area.

Still no where near perfect however which is why im posting it Do i need to thin them more?

That's a definite improvement, but you still need to thin your paints more. If you can see textures and brush marks in your paint where there were none on the bare model, your paint is too thick. The white and metallic parts in particular are still kind of thick and chalky. What color are you priming your models? You could get away with priming them white or grey and it would take a lot less paint to cover those areas, whereas the black will cover over white much better than the other way around.

Don't fret too much about painting perfectly neatly because you can always come back over and clean things up if you need to. A model doesn't ever need to be finished unless you say it is and you can always put more paint on. Taking it off is much more labor intensive and difficult, which is why it's so important to paint in thin coats so that you don't build up visible texture in the paint.

Okay! thank you

No worries, keep at it because you are learning and getting better. It just takes time and practice.

Don't stop until your done painting it and base it the best you can at the moment. THEN step back and take a good look. When I do this I'm astonished how many models get painted each month.

Priming white is a nice cheap trick for yellow. You can always add a single layer of abaddon black for the black parts before painting them.

First off, you're doing fine as a new painter - and if I'm honest, your stuff is already on the level of 90% of the stuff I see in stores.

I agree you need to work a bit on cleaning up the miniature after you cut or clip it out (generally using an x-actor knife or a file to trim down the "gates" where the pieces were attached to the sprue). As you get better and look back on stuff in a year or two you'll start to regret not cleaning them up- and once they're painted it's a pain in the ass to go back and fix. However, lots of people miss bits, and I still do to this day.

The paints need a bit of watering down, and if I may suggest - skip painting silver directly onto components. A metal, particularly a light silver like yours often looks better if you "dry brush" it on over a black base, instead of actually painting the silver directly onto the miniature. You can find a million tutorials on how to dry brush, and while it's normally used for picking up edges, you can heavily dry brush any surface and using black under the metal gives the metal some depth.

This is an example; the wraithguard here have black rifles, heavily dry brushed with a dark tin colour - but I didn't just paint the tin directly over the black heavily...just dry brushed it on, leaving the darkness underneath and in the cracks and gaps.



It's a good way to cheat and get a richer, more interesting metal finish - beyond heavy coats of metallic paint.

Same methods were used here:


Again, just using the black undercoat and drybrushing the golds and bronzes over top.

thank you all so much for the feedback!