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Geisladisk posted:Maybe a strange question - But how do I get good at painting? Trying to make every piece decent can be counterproductive. Find things you suck at. Do them over and over until you no longer cringe at what you've created. Then do them some more until you actually like it. This is the hard, painful way to do it, but the slow and more enjoyable way clearly is stalling. No matter what, though, loving up is a vital component of getting better, it's just a matter of how concentrated it is. If you aren't loving up, you aren't getting better. If it's something you enjoy, you can also try some other art. Drawing and painting have a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't transfer over really, but composition, color theory, and just knowing what looks good is universal. This has been amazingly vague advice, but your question was pretty vague, so it's hard to be specific.
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Nov 15, 2015 19:08
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signalnoise posted:When you guys are doing base/shade/highlight stuff, how do you prefer to do it? Some tutorials I see say to use other colors to darken or lighten a base color. ~Duncan Rhodes~ on the other hand has every color imaginable apparently and GW makes it super easy to have a perfect match in Layer paints for highlighting a Base paint. I have a fuckload of paint, but can never seem to get a good match for shading and highlighting. I'll quote my first painting teacher that taught me about color theory: don't be so out of the tube. A midtone is a color that you can lighten or darken the value of and is the midpoint between the darkest shade or lightest tint of that color. Notice how a pure color has a natural value to it. Some pure colors are brighter or darker than others. Warm colors are brighter than their compliments, such as yellow being brighter than violet and orange is brighter than blue. But yellow is still brighter than orange and red and green is brighter than blue and violet. You don't have to add black, grey, or white to a color in order to lighten or darken it. When mixing paint, if you try to darken a yellow with black or grey, it usually looks like poo poo. Usually, you can mix a base color with an adjacent color on the color wheel to darken or brighten it. Adding violet or a little blue to a red will give you a shade of red that is a more natural transition. Mixing colors that are complimentary is how you neutralize color to make a midtone. Even by adding just a little bit of red to a pure green, you'll notice how the addition of red makes the green look like a more natural green that you would see outside in the trees. In order to do this, start with your base color. Maybe that color is red. Begin adding a pure green to that red in little bits. Add green until you are satisfied with your red tone. Don't add enough green to turn the color into brown, but just enough that the red still comes through. Something you can do is get a sheet of bristol board smooth from an art supply store, grid out a bunch of squares, and experiment with your color mixes by making swatches. I think I'm going to spend my fall break finally getting to that color mixing demo. EDIT: Until I can get around to that color mixing guide, you can learn a little bit about mixing color by watching some Bob Ross. Seriously. You probably won't be able to mix paint on your models in the same way he is mixing color on the canvas, but the same principles apply. Star Man fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Nov 15, 2015 |
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Nov 15, 2015 20:01
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signalnoise posted:Ummm like 3 years off and on? I'm capable of doing decent work but I'm generally impatient is all. Like Iron Crowned said he painted 2 models for a combined 25 hours, I will likely never do that, and I have no desire or time to do that. Maybe I'm jumping ahead a little bit in asking for color advice but you literally cannot paint this stuff without choosing colors, so I'd like to work on that. I mean what, do you expect me to basecoat a bunch of minis and not shade or highlight them for a year, for practice? No, really the only way to get better is to practice. If you're a total n00b your first minis are going to suck. You don't have to spend 10+ hours on minis, you can make a decent tabletop quality model by having a midtone, a shade, and a highlight. One more thing, being impatient isnt conductive to painting minis.
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Nov 15, 2015 20:17
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signalnoise posted:At this point I'm trying to figure out how to do this most easily. I'd prefer to have a bright and vibrant style, but I get better results it seems when I'm super conservative and go with relatively dark colors. So I pick bright paints when I'm buying paints, then go back and pick more muted colors, and by the time I'm done... maybe I don't own midtones? If you want to cheat, you could just buy Reaper triads and use those. They might not have as wide a range between shade and highlight as you want, but it'd be a start. Also, look at models you like, and see what colors they have on their models. You can use the eye-dropper tool in Photoshop or whatever to see the actual color. Pick a few points on the model, look at the colors, and buy or mix up those colors to paint with. Reaper even has a tool for this: http://www.reapermini.com/powerpalette Finally, if you want to get good, you might just have to accept that your initial forays into improving your technique will take a long time. Spending 10 hours on a guy to learn a technique doesn't mean it'll take 10 hours when you've mastered it.
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Nov 15, 2015 20:25
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Reading a ton of tutorials definitely helped for me, especially at the beginning. I find both miniature painting and digital painting ones helpful since the two are intertwined skills in a way for me and a lot of painting advice in general can be transferred to miniatures. Getting some cheap minis to experiment on also helps, both for colour schemes and techniques. These days Reaper Bones would probably the thing to go for. I also just finished some Praetorians for Dropzone, they just need varnishing before they go on their bases. Glowy goggles mean they're stealthy  
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Nov 15, 2015 20:28
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signalnoise posted:Ummm like 3 years off and on? First, with your wash-gone-wrong above, it looks like you had a bad run-in with something hydrophobic. It could be the paint, but it could also be either something that was in your mix-pot or even on your brush. In any event, the "pooling" effect you're seeing is caused by surface tension. Whenever you are doing any kind of wash, it's worth putting a tiny drop of something like Future Floor Wax in it to reduce surface tension and keep the wash from pooling on the high surfaces instead of settling into the low recesses. Second, in terms of improving your painting, based on the examples you've posted, the biggest two skills that I think would help you are brush control and color theory. Other posters have explained color theory fairly well. What I would suggest is that you grab a cheap mini that has something that needs highlighting, like a cloak or whatever. Get a couple of the same mini (something cheap). Pick what base color you want to paint it (let's say blue, for sake of argument). From that same base color, pick one highlight color and one shade color for each mini. Experiment with how far from the base color your shade and highlight are. Practice applying the three colors and see the effect it has on the mini. When you talk about "style," in my mind this is one of the things that sets it off most visibly - the amount of difference between base and shade/highlight colors. The bigger the difference in tone, the more "cartoony" the mini will look. The smaller the difference in tone, the more "drab" a mini will look. Once you understand how this works, you can start to experiment with adding layers between the base and the highlight. So for instance, instead of doing shade, base, highlight, you do shade, base, base+highlight, highlight, for a 4-color transition. Then try 5, etc. The more colors, the smoother transition. This is how good painters can get very vibrant differences between shades and highlights without looking cartoony - the transition between colors isn't as abrupt and jarring to the eye. Eventually, this is where advanced techniques like wet-blending come in. Finally, brush control. All of the color theory in the world is useless if you lack brush control. If you're slopping colors around on the mini and "painting outside the lines" so-to-speak, your mini is going to look like poo poo regardless. In terms of the amount of paint on a brush, less is better. It also helps to understand how different consistency of paints flow off your brush and respond to the edges, creases, or bumps on a mini. Like anything else, it gets easier the more you do it. Hope that helps.
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Nov 15, 2015 21:02
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Anyone have tips or links on ways to paint worn or battle damaged wooden shields that have images or heraldry painted on then? I have some ideas but it's new to me so I would love to read other's take on it before I go to the trial and error approach.
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Nov 15, 2015 21:31
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If you really want to go whole hog, you can paint the woodgrain on it, then use a liquid mask product of some sort (vallejo and humbrol make them, I'm sure others do as well) to create the areas where you want damage to show through later (a torn up sponge and a toothpick are useful tools for applying this in random chips and slashes), then paint your heraldry, then gently remove the liquid mask to reveal the wood grain underneath.
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Nov 15, 2015 21:44
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1. Pick something to focus on improving every model. Today we're gonna knock out some skintones, or edge highlights, or painting in the lines, or whatever better than last time. 2. A midtone is whatever you want it to be. Mix some colors in to make it lighter or darker. Some will look bad. Some will look good. It's not science, it's art. It's not a formula to be learned and applied, it's a creative growth process. Just let it all go and paint some stuff. Get better next time. 3. You don't have to spend 10+ hours on a model. It's probably a lot better if you don't. You can click on the question mark and look through my stuff in this thread. It's pretty rare I spend more than 2.5 to 3 hours on a mini usually it's less.
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Nov 15, 2015 22:32
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I forgot who was asking for specific pictures of how paint should look but I found some. I think it was signalnoise? Anyway, found these while looking around to see what sorts of proportions other mini artists use for their solutions: https://www.reapermini.com/TheCraft/15 . I mixed up a bottle of that 80/10/10 solution because it sounds hilarious and probably more for my preferred style of blending anyway.
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Nov 15, 2015 22:35
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Chill la Chill posted:I forgot who was asking for specific pictures of how paint should look but I found some. I think it was signalnoise? Anyway, found these while looking around to see what sorts of proportions other mini artists use for their solutions: https://www.reapermini.com/TheCraft/15 . I mixed up a bottle of that 80/10/10 solution because it sounds hilarious and probably more for my preferred style of blending anyway. That's actually a really great article, the only thing it's missing is glazes, which I think are just even thinner and more transparent (is translucent th right word?) than washes. And it was signalnoise who was asking about that exact thing. So I'm on my trip to the US to visit my mom and went to Walmart to get a plunger for her toilet. Walked out with bottles of Gorilla glue (available in the UK but everything is cheaper in Uncle Sam bucks), Loctite spray glue, huge popsicle sticks, Tacky Glue (not sure how different it is to normal PVA but whatever, it was there), big brushes for drybrushing terrain and some other stuff. For some reason my mom even had a bottle of Mod Podge, which I've liberated as she didn't even know why she got it. I'm going to hit Michael's at some point and see if there are any railroad shops in the city (San Antonio) but can anyone think of other hobby items that are easy/cheap for guys in the US to find but expensive or hard to get in the UK/EU?
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Nov 15, 2015 22:57
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nesbit37 posted:Anyone have tips or links on ways to paint worn or battle damaged wooden shields that have images or heraldry painted on then? I have some ideas but it's new to me so I would love to read other's take on it before I go to the trial and error approach. This was my approach.
 
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Nov 15, 2015 23:09
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A little while back y'all were talking about a nice black colour- I think it was a p3 one? Anyone remember the name? And that reapermini paint guide is aces. Haven't seen that one before.
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Nov 16, 2015 00:03
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:This was my approach. Awesome thanks.
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Nov 16, 2015 00:16
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Dr. Phildo posted:A little while back y'all were talking about a nice black colour- I think it was a p3 one? Anyone remember the name? Either P3 Thamar Black (actual black) or P3 Coal Black (a deep sea blue/green). Here's the list I made of all the Good Paints: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=3705692&perpage=40&pagenumber=109#post451418381
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Nov 16, 2015 00:18
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That's the list I was looking for, thanks dentist!
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Nov 16, 2015 00:21
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Geisladisk posted:Maybe a strange question - But how do I get good at painting? I started looking at models I really liked the paint jobs on and either tried to directly paint something like that or at least take one of the things on that model I really liked (Very nice blended power weapon/rust effect/nmm) etc and did that on my next model. I went through a phase of trying something new on everything I painted and I think that honestly helped me more than painting lots. Also the abject refusal to ever scrap anything halfway through and throw it in the paint stripper.
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Nov 16, 2015 00:22
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serious gaylord posted:I went through a phase of trying something new on everything I painted and I think that honestly helped me more than painting lots. quote:Also the abject refusal to ever scrap anything halfway through and throw it in the paint stripper.
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Nov 16, 2015 01:01
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Avenging Dentist posted:Either P3 Thamar Black (actual black) or P3 Coal Black (a deep sea blue/green). Here's the list I made of all the Good Paints: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=3705692&perpage=40&pagenumber=109#post451418381 As someone that learned how to paint traditionally, my eyes catch fire whenever I see these cutesy trademarked names for model paints. Just call it ivory black, god drat it. Not that I'm making a dig at you, Avenging Dentist. It's a jab at these model paint manufacturers.
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Nov 16, 2015 01:12
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Star Man posted:As someone that learned how to paint traditionally, my eyes catch fire whenever I see these cutesy trademarked names for model paints. Just call it ivory black, god drat it. One of the benefits of using VMC.  Their equivalent for Thamar Black is just "Black" and their Coal Black equivalent is "Dark Sea Blue".
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Nov 16, 2015 01:18
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Star Man posted:As someone that learned how to paint traditionally, my eyes catch fire whenever I see these cutesy trademarked names for model paints. Just call it ivory black, god drat it. I want to blame GW for starting the trend in order to minimise interoperability with cheaper non-citadel paints, but I'm not sure if that's actually true. Was cutesy model colour names a thing before GW paints?
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Nov 16, 2015 01:20
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Avenging Dentist posted:One of the benefits of using VMC. That's not the reason I prefer Vallejo model paints, but it's certainly a plus. Although, their game color paints are just as guilty as everyone else. Then again, when oil paint manufacturers make something like ivory black, you can assume that charred bone fragments are the pigment used in the paint. I don't know if modelling paints use the same pigments or not, but if they don't it would explain why I've never seen a phthalo green among model paints. Star Man fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Nov 16, 2015 |
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Nov 16, 2015 01:27
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Is there some great secret to getting a nice clean white? Try as I might I never seem to get it either clean enough, or not looking too chalky/caked on. Closest I've gotten is priming white, then building up thin layers of Celestra Grey, then White Scar. Is there a way to not suck at it?
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Nov 16, 2015 02:04
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SteelMentor posted:Is there some great secret to getting a nice clean white? Try as I might I never seem to get it either clean enough, or not looking too chalky/caked on. This is in the OP. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2URRLoQE5-I
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Nov 16, 2015 02:07
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 brother sergeant Actio two pistols in the saddle pic of himself on his back
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Nov 16, 2015 08:50
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Back to the subject of pinning, I think I realized the solution to my problem of pinning really tiny poo poo: guitar strings. They're easy to get, really narrow (I have as small as 0.009" lying around), and made of spring steel, which should be plenty durable for a short pin. Now I just need to learn to be sufficiently precise with drilling.
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Nov 16, 2015 09:17
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Avenging Dentist posted:Back to the subject of pinning, I think I realized the solution to my problem of pinning really tiny poo poo: guitar strings. They're easy to get, really narrow (I have as small as 0.009" lying around), and made of spring steel, which should be plenty durable for a short pin. Now I just need to learn to be sufficiently precise with drilling. I drill one hole, stick a small pin in it that just about peeks out of the hole (enough to grab and take out again), whack some paint on the end and then press the bits together, then drill the other piece where the paint mark is. Works out pretty well.
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Nov 16, 2015 09:20
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SteelMentor posted:Is there some great secret to getting a nice clean white? Try as I might I never seem to get it either clean enough, or not looking too chalky/caked on. I just use the white I want and build it up in several thin coats. The trick is getting the paint watered down to a good consistency, since it usually helps to be a little thinner than you would normally use for highlighting but not by much. Usually the answer to anything that isn't smooth enough is more layers with a thinner paint.
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Nov 16, 2015 15:30
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This may seem like a silly question but can I use rattle can primers in spray booths?
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Nov 16, 2015 18:44
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krushgroove posted:For some reason my mom even had a bottle of Mod Podge, which I've liberated as she didn't even know why she got it. every home in the us has a bottle of modge podge of unknown origins
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Nov 16, 2015 19:16
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ijyt posted:This may seem like a silly question but can I use rattle can primers in spray booths? Not if it's flammable, unless you have a sparkless fan (expensive)
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Nov 16, 2015 19:21
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ijyt posted:This may seem like a silly question but can I use rattle can primers in spray booths? Yes. The difference between rattlecan and compressor powered stuff is just a chemical propellant. The point of the spray booth is to ventilate away and contain the particles and potentially toxic solvents or whatever. signalnoise posted:Not if it's flammable, unless you have a sparkless fan (expensive) e:f,b and with the opposite advice. Well I guess that's potentially true, but I think in practice the amount of propellant vs distance between the fan and spray point would make it hard for this to matter. I guess if you have a tiny booth and the spray can's nozzle is less than a foot from the fan, and its a fan made in the 80s? Honestly, the worst case is you try it, it lights the nozzle for a split second, you stop spraying, and never do it again. TheCosmicMuffet fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Nov 16, 2015 |
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Nov 16, 2015 19:28
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ijyt posted:This may seem like a silly question but can I use rattle can primers in spray booths? I do, but mine really only helps with overspray. The fumes are another matter entirely.
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Nov 16, 2015 19:41
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Personally I just wouldn't do it just cause propellants stink up a room for a long time
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Nov 16, 2015 20:28
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I decided to do the Ghostkeel in a grey scheme with selected plates in an digi urban cammo scheme as that's something I've never done before. I can't mask all the plates off and spray them at the same time as it's akward so I did the first two last night.  
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Nov 16, 2015 20:39
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El Estrago Bonito posted:This video is pretty good, the guy doing it is a bit awkward butg w/e: This is kind of the understanding I already had on how to do stone. Z the IVth posted:Chest of colours (Google them) has an excellent step by step marble base tutorial. This is really nice, but I am kind of at a complete loss as to what GW line paints would match what they are using in these pictures.  This is essentially what I am going for, with perhaps a brighter white, as opposed to a light grey. I am really open to suggestions, but I chose the Sanctuary style because I felt it was the closest Dragonforge had to really fitting the Roman theme of the Ultramarines. My main issue is I am kind of unsure what to use for my colors. Should I start with Ceramite White as my base and use Nuln Oil to fill in the cracks? Or perhaps go with a Base Grey on the tiles, and use a base White on any Pillars and Fleur De Lis that show up? Maybe moving up to Ulthuan Grey on the grey areas, and White Scar on the White ones? TheArmorOfContempt fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Nov 16, 2015 |
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Nov 16, 2015 21:07
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I'd go with whatever dheneb stone is these days This just popped up on my fb feed:  As well as being rad as gently caress, the way the parchment was done is cool: "I made the parchments out of paper bits that I cut out and shaped, then underpainted and after that soaked in superglue after attaching them to the banner. Then I painted them. " Probably should say that was from https://www.siegestudios.co.uk to give the dude credit Skarsnik fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Nov 16, 2015 |
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Nov 16, 2015 21:23
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Uroboros posted:This is kind of the understanding I already had on how to do stone. I'd prime them grey, wash them black or brown, then do lighter coats of grey up to an almost-white like Ulthuan Grey.
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Nov 16, 2015 22:50
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signalnoise posted:Ummm like 3 years off and on? I'm capable of doing decent work but I'm generally impatient is all. Like Iron Crowned said he painted 2 models for a combined 25 hours, I will likely never do that, and I have no desire or time to do that. Maybe I'm jumping ahead a little bit in asking for color advice but you literally cannot paint this stuff without choosing colors, so I'd like to work on that. I mean what, do you expect me to basecoat a bunch of minis and not shade or highlight them for a year, for practice? Faust has a good video about Highlighting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMipGGv4sgw And also one that covers decent techniques for using washes to supplement highlighting and drybrushing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yGbIR6ooko IDK how else to say it? You choose two colors, you mix them to make highlights. As the highlights get smaller, you favor the lighter color more in the mix. If it gets too bright or over highlighted you use a wash or glaze to bring everything back down to normal/unify the colors.
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Nov 16, 2015 23:22
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big_g posted:I decided to do the Ghostkeel in a grey scheme with selected plates in an digi urban cammo scheme as that's something I've never done before. It looks like he's wearing camo cargo shorts, ready to jump in the pit at a Sepultura show.
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Nov 16, 2015 23:57
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