Miniature Painting/Sculpting/Modelling Megathread (Shut up and use Simple Green)

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Miniature Painting/Sculpting/Modelling Megathread (Shut up and use Simple Green)

Pagan: Jun 4, 2003

Has anyone actually purchased videos from

http://www.miniaturementor.com/painting_tutorials.html these guys? Is it worth it? I'd love to be able to see someone paint, so I can figure out what I'm doing wrong, but at those prices it's pretty steep.

I'm not the best painter of regular guys, but I'll post a few things here.

Some SM scouts and a vehicle. These are my newest / best completed squad.

I'm very pleased with my vehicles, but always looking to get better.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2009 23:28

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 07:26

Pagan: Jun 4, 2003

I haven't painted horses in about forever, since I don't play fantasy all that much. Here's a horse from my old Chaos army, painted circa 2003.

Not terrible, but not great.

My new army is Empire, and I've got a huge soft spot for Cavalry. I think they look cool, and they play cool too. Knights and Pistolliers are just awesome, so I've got a bunch of them in my army. 15 Pistolliers and 15 knights so far, in fact. I decided to paint the pistolliers first, and I've got the first unit of 5 almost done. The guys aren't finished but the horses pretty much are. I'm also trying to stay close to real life horses.

This is a bay horse in real life

And these are my two bay horses, painted.

A buckskin.

My buckskin

This one is a greyish appaloosa, which I don't know if such a thing really exists. Here's a "real" appaloosa...

and mine

Here's a generic, kinda bay-ish horse.

And now here they are all line up, ready to have some fun.

One color I'm trying to get right, but having trouble with, is the "silver dun."

I think that's an amazing looking horse, but my attempt at is looking more like some fantasy style "nightmare."

Highlighting black is tricky, and that pure white hair is drat hard too. I think this color scheme has potential to look great, but my paintjob just isn't living up to it. Any tips or advice would be well appreciated, on this horse or any of them. One area I realize I made a mistake is the eyes. You never see the whites of a horses eyes unless it's terrified, so I'm going to go back in and do the eyeballs all dark brown, with maybe a spot of highlight or two.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2009 16:42

Pagan: Jun 4, 2003

Illandriel posted:

Well, someone made off with my DSLR camera last night from my car. So no Picture updates from me for a while.

I've had that happen too. Do you have renter's or homeowner's insurance? They should cover it.

PaintVagrant posted:

The colors on the horse in the pic are very warm, and the colors you chose for the model are very cool. Instead of highlighting the black using blue, try a warm brown (snakebite?) and for the white areas, start with a warm white, like skull white w a little snakebite/iyanden/etc in it

I redid the mane and hooves, and they look great; I started with bleached bone and built up to pure white, and it looks much better. But I'm at a loss to doing the black with warm colors. Could you post some pix so I can see? It just seems like brown doesn't mix well with black; it just turns a muddy grey when I try to darken it.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2009 20:28

Pagan: Jun 4, 2003

I've realized that my biggest weakness, when painting, is that I can't blend. I can layer, I can water down paints properly, and I've got good brush control. But I can't get a smooth gradient from one color to another. I don't know if it's paints that are too thin or not thin enough or not having enough colors in between, but whatever it is, I can't get good smooth blends.

Here are some armored horses I'm working on. I figured, partially because I've never tried it, partially for the challenge, and partially because I like how it looks, I'd give NMM a try. And although I understand the basic concepts, I just can't get the blends to work well enough to be happy.

Each of these horses I've tried something a little different with, to see what I do and don't like, and all I've really focused on is the blue armor. So don't be too harsh on the other parts.

Does anyone have a link to a great (preferably video) tutorial on blending? And of course, critiques and comments are welcome.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2009 05:13

Pagan: Jun 4, 2003

PaintVagrant posted:

2 things right off the top that I can see are an issue:

1) youre final edge highlights are wayyyyy too thick and long, they need to be much more thinly applied

2)youre jumping too quickly up to pure white (which should almost never be used) Your final highlight should be a good deal lighter than your last blend, but youre going to white to fast

Those damned horse armor panels are wicked hard to get the line highlight on, because of their shape

Alright, so how do I thin them? I'm already using paint that's thinned down pretty good, and lightly running the edge of the brush along the highlight. Even my finest tipped brush, were I to use the point, would leave thicker lines than that.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2009 15:41

Pagan: Jun 4, 2003

!amicable posted:

It also does not look like you are blending as much as layering. I can see the distinct boundary where you layed down each color. Blending means you lay down your high mid and dark on the miniature, then feather them together.
Of course it might be more complicated, maybe you only blend the dark to mid then the mid the light, but when you are done there should be a gradient, not a distinct division between color 1 and color 2.
For your darkest color you might consider something a bit less saturated since areas that get less light reflect less color, but that's not really super important.

The second horse from the right looks really good. If you can manage to clean up the paint work, I think you can push that one pretty far. It might also be what PV said: that horse looks like it has the most "inbetween" tones before the final highlight.

True, I am layering, because I can't for the life of me get paints to blend smoothly, and consistently. I've tried wet blending, but I don't have a flow retardant, so the paint dries pretty quickly. Or if I try thin layers, I get "tidal pools" where the pigment ends up in wierd places.

I want to get better. Help me obi-wan ke-forums, you're my only hope!

# ¿ Oct 10, 2009 15:45

Pagan: Jun 4, 2003

Ok, so I did some homework and tried doing blending on flat areas. I even invested in some Liquitex Slo Dri Blending Medium I'm pretty happy with the slow dri, I mixed a little in with the water I paint with, and it does make the water much "wetter." I also picked up my first Windsor And Newton, a 00, and I'm almost afraid to take it out of it's little plastic tube.

But, I'm still running into the same problems I've always had.

In a nutshell, I get brush strokes in the paint no matter how thin it is, because the water / paint "bulges" underneath the brush. So wherever I lift the brush from the surface, I end up with a droplet of paint underneath the brush. And when this dries, this ends up leaving tidal marks and blotchy.

Here are some various areas I experimented with, and none of them are good gradients. If anything, the closest to what I want is the black to white blend, which I did by putting down Pure Black and Pure White next to each other, and just worked them together. The blue is the second best, because I slowly added the light color to the still damp dark color on the pallet and tried to blend them in.

But none of it's perfect. I'm hoping one of you experts can see what's going wrong and give me some advice. I also apologize for hogging the thread with my personal painting problems.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2009 00:38

Pagan: Jun 4, 2003

I'm glad you guys don't mind helping.

While I'm in the mood to practice . . . What other skills are important? PV, you said I was probably tackling blending too early.

I did try a small checkerboard pattern on my practice piece, and that came out alright. You mentioned thin lines; how thin is "thin" ? What else should I try?

# ¿ Oct 11, 2009 01:38

Pagan: Jun 4, 2003

My homework project ended up looking like a modern art piece.

But, the stuff I practiced there did end up helping. Here's another attempt at blending, which I think looks much better than it did before.

With that said, this is a damned tedious process, and the thought of doing it on 15 knights is a bit . . . well, needless to say, I'm open to other ideas on how to make their armor look cool without using metallic paints. And gently caress it a paint job that looks great on a mini doesn't look much worse blown up on a computer screen at 300%

# ¿ Oct 12, 2009 22:00

Pagan: Jun 4, 2003

!amicable posted:

Dude, that is awesome.

I personally have tried to scale photos to miniatures, but they usually look worse for it. It's a bitch no matter what you do, using a flash will gently caress the way the colors look.

Anyway, despite the photo, the horse looks really good. I think you could pull it off as lacquered armor on the knights, it would be pretty sweet. The more you do it, the faster you will be able to work. On the other hand, you could just go for some simple armor using metalics and thin layers of color to spruce it up.

I'll try to dig up a tutorial of what I mean, it's definitely a cool option.

I ended up doing a much better job of layering. I can layer the horses in about 10 to 15 minutes each, blending was taking up to an hour. And with practice, the layering looks close enough to the blending that it's okay. I'll save the work intensive stuff for characters and important models.

With that said, I'd love to see even some examples of lacquered armor. Even without a tutorial I could still probably figure something out.

# ¿ Oct 13, 2009 23:43

Pagan: Jun 4, 2003

Hey, PaintVagrant, how 'bout a little tutorial on glazing? I picked up some Liquitex Glazing Medium, and I've experimented with it, but I'd like to hear from the expert.

!amicable, I'm the guy with the ice blue camo marines. I'll post a project log on EoW next week. Anything specific you'd like to see?

# ¿ Oct 15, 2009 05:53

Pagan: Jun 4, 2003

I've been working on this guy, and I'm pretty happy with how he looks, but a lot of people have mentioned the blinders as being too nurgly. Fair enough.

I'm still on the fence about it, and since it's too rainy to prime, I've got time to decide. I'd like to have a little more in depth discussion here, so as not to clutter up the GBS thread with my indecisiveness.

Reasons to keep it like it is :

I think with the proper paint, I can make the eyes look like simple metal blinders, like you'd see on almost any horse.
I'm not experienced, at all, with greenstuff, so sculpting anything more complex than a smooth flat surface might be a challenge.

Reasons to change it :

The leprous spore buboe theme is prevalent in nurgle
Having a horse that looks mean, rough, and gritty is great, but a chaos steed is not okay for a warrior priest
The more I change it, the more unique my model becomes, which is always a good thing.

So, I'd like to see some ideas or pix of what else I could do without surpassing my meager greenstuff skills.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2009 17:23

Pagan: Jun 4, 2003

crime fighting hog posted:

Okay, so you can use Future Floor to make your own washes, but what can I make for my own gloss and dullcote through an airbush? Anyone know?

Future, thinned a little with water, is a great gloss coat, and Tamiya makes a product called Flat Base that you can mix with future for a flat finish.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2009 00:21

Pagan: Jun 4, 2003

I did try my hand at some greenstuff on the warrior priests horse. Didn't come out as good as it could have, but still better than I anticipated. I've also primed and started doing base coats on the horse.

In the meantime, I finished up all the blue knight horses; here they are fully completed. Flock, dullcoats, everything. There are actually 14 of them, and I'm quite pleased with how it all came out.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2009 18:31

Pagan: Jun 4, 2003

I've started on the armor of my Priest's horse, and I'd like some feedback and critique. I'm happy, so far, with the armor on the front legs, but not so much with the panels on the side.

I am pretty happy with the horses skin tone and the white tail and fetlocks, but I'm open to criticism on anything.

# ¿ Nov 4, 2009 17:39

Pagan: Jun 4, 2003

PaintVagrant posted:

I no likey plastic glue.

I think its because when if I screw something up and put too much glue in the bond and it leaks outside of the joint, it damages the model there.

And it takes forever to try

For the amount of models you're doing, you should be using Methyl Ethyl Ketone. It can be found in the paint thinner section of your local hardware store.

I started with one of these : http://www3.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/WTI0001P?I=LXHE35&P=8 That's $3 for 1 oz. Then I bought a big thing of MEK, I think I got a quart for $9 or something. That's about 35 CENTS an ounce. When the little glass jar gets empty, I refill it from the MEK bottle. It works just the same, and when applied thinly it dries almost instantly. Just press together for a second or two, and that's it.

You have to be careful because it can run, but applying a thin solution with a brush shouldn't be too challenging for you, PV. It's also a wonderful cleaner for your airbrush; I run a little through as my final step to make sure I've gotten rid of any paint. The one big jar of MEK has lasted me almost two years, and I do a lot of model building. It's what I used to scratchbuild my Valkyrie, along with everything else I've done recently. For plastic models, it is by far the best glue I've ever used.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2009 18:05

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 07:26

Pagan: Jun 4, 2003

A Powerful Cream posted:

Anyone got some cool newbie terrain guides (maybe a few to go in da OP). Me and my friend usually play with books and other bullshit as terrain and it's kind of unsatisfying so I'd like to try and make something.

I'd prefer guides that can teach me to do things with household materials so I don't have to leave my house to face the harsh sunlight.

What, in particular, are you interested in building? At a minimum, you'll need some foamcore and some insulation foam, along with glue and heavy card paper. You can cut up cereal boxes for that part.

The GW terrain book is excellent for starters, and you can search online and find tons of examples. It's really not very hard to build terrain, and even the crappiest thing you can do will be loads better than books and soda cans. I think my first terrain piece ever was a piece of packing foam from a computer part, with windows cut out, painted and drybrushed. That was it. And it worked.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2009 07:47

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