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i am working on a bunch of OP posts for an update to our venerable minis painting thread. i am busy copy-pasting stuff from old OPs and some new OP stuff and some effortposts so this will have more shortly in the meantime, please appreciate this picture of michael lonsdale as jean-pierre in ronin while posting  these OPs are always a catalog of random things goons think should belong in them. so if you have any suggestions for additions, post them. and if i don't post any more, just report your own post and ask a mod to add it to the OP. Related threads Building and painting miniatures for tabletop games is part of a larger scale modeling hobby, too large to fit into this one thread. You can always post or discuss any painted miniature here, but there are several threads with a narrower focus which might have more-specific advice or discussion.
Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Feb 29, 2024 |
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thread (but neither is this one).
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Getting Started I am going to assume you have some miniatures to paint, from whatever game you play or some guys you bought just because you thought they were cool. If you don't, there's a wide variety of options, but a good place to start might be these guys without a bunch of complicated clothes to paint. Tabletop miniatures are almost always going to be made of (high-impact polystyrene) plastic, (pewter or white) metal, printed resin, or poured resin. Metal is more common in older models, while the shift to resin is more recent. The most popular scale for models is 28mm, popularized by Games Workshop and used for many other games. But you also see 5mm/6mm scale models (Battletech, Epic 40K and Legiones Imperialis) and 40mm scale (Marvel Crisis Protocol, Star Wars Shatterpoint). (The scales only loosely relate to the actual size of the miniatures but that's a big long boring conversation.) There are different techniques for different sizes, but for the most part, the main tools are the same. WHAT YOU NEED TO START This is an arts and crafts hobby, so you will need tools. There are many, many other tools you can buy, ranging from gimmicks to practically indispensable, but these are the basics you won't want to go without. A warning on tools: you can generally buy tools at the same game store where you buy your models, but they're likely to be overpriced for the relative quality. (Games Workshop's brand, Citadel, is infamous for this.) Most tools can be bought elsewhere, with less of a "gamer tax" for wargame-oriented brands. A well-lit workspace: This does not have to be complicated but it does need to be large enough for you to access all the tools you're using at one time. It also needs a source of direct light, ideally one you can adjust as needed. A simple armature lamp will do the job just fine. Work mat: A vinyl cutting mat, A2 or A3 or comparable is a good size. (Generally, >12" by >17" will do.) There are a variety of these, made for all sorts of modelling, paper, and sewing crafts, so they're easy to find. "Self-healing" mats are the right kind, but adhesive mats made for cricut are not. Any impermeable cutting board will do, but these cutting mats are cheap and ubiquitous, in hobby, sewing, papercraft, and art supply stores. You are going to be cutting away from yourself and occasionally spilling paint or glue or solvent. You want a working surface that your blade can't cut through, which won't damage your blade, won't absorb solvents, and can be removed for cleaning or replacement. Brushes: Assuming you weren't planning to use fingerpaints or a toothpick, obviously you need a brush. I recommend everyone start with at least a #2 brush, for covering larger areas, and a #0 brush, for painting details. Probably synthetic (aka taklon, polyester, synthetic sable) or a cheaper red sable brush. Atlas, which has practically no web presence, has a nice line of cheaper sable brushes for beginners. You can get brushes in craft stores or art supply stores, but don't spend a lot of money. You'll need to learn to take care of a brush first, and the same techniques apply to cheap and expensive high-end brushes. Plus, there are some tasks you don't want to do with expensive brushes anyway. There are some gamer-branded brushes, including Citadel and Army Painter, with names describing their role rather than using traditional brush sizes. If you buy these, get a large area brush and a general detail brush, but honestly? These are overpriced and probably were not handled well in transit. Kolinsky sable is the gold standard for brush fibers, but those are going to run you about ten times the cost, and require careful handling to offer any advantage over synthetic or cheaper sable brushes. If you already know how to keep high-end brushes in good shape and have the money to spend, feel free to start with the best. Brush soap: For washing paint out of your brush. Master's Brush Soap is perfect and ubiquitous. You can get it in any sort of hobby, craft, or art store, and a little pot of it will run you about $10 and last forever. You don't absolutely need this but your brushes are on borrowed time if you don't have it. Sprue cutters: aka hobby snips, clippers, or nippers. A set of clippers with one flat side, for cutting out parts of models to assemble them. (Sprue, in modelling hobbies, is used interchangeably to refer to the larger piece of plastic that you cut pieces out of, or any unneeded scrap leftover from the modelling process.) You can buy these in hobby stores, craft stores, or hardware stores. Any flat-edged clipper or cutter will do, as long as the flat edge is flush with one side of the blade(s). Don't spend more than $10 on these! Really nice ones, usually aimed at gunpla modellers, are single-bladed and precision measured and razor-sharp, and they really are lovely to use. But they're not $100 nicer, and some of their advantages (mainly fragile, razor-thin blade edges) are disadvantages in the context of wargame modelling. Precision isn't that important, since you're going to be cleaning up the scars from where the parts connect to the sprue with a knife anyway. Sprue cutters should not be used to cut anything harder than plastic, resin, soft metal, or similarly soft materials. Doing so will destroy the blades. If you need to cut wire, paperclips, pins, guitar string, or anything else, use proper wirecutters or pliers. Hobby knife: An Xacto knife or equivalent, or some similar razor/hobby knife. You'll want this for cleaning up nubs from the gates (points of contact) of the sprue left on your models, mold lines, and other imperfections left behind by the molding process. You can find these in any crafting or hobby store, or even in office supply stores. I swear by the Excel K18 but everyone has their preferences. If you're going to go with an Xacto-style blade like that one, what you're looking for is a safety cap, a shape that won't roll off the table, and a tightening collar that isn't under your fingers while you work. What you don't need is a storage case, or a bunch of one-off specialist blades. A first hobby knife will most likely be under $10. You can get various molded or comfort handles with knives made for papercrafters, but I find those are awkward and overly expensive. For replacing blades, you're looking for #2, #11, or #11M Xacto blades, generally in bulk. Replace the blade any time your knife is starting to feel a little awkward, or if you get it fouled with glue or paint. (A sharp knife is much more predictable, and as such safer.) There are plenty of other handy blades and tool attachments, but none that a beginner needs to worry about overmuch. When it comes time to dispose of blades, make sure it's in a sealed container, because they will cut their way out of your trash bags otherwise. Some people use breakaway hobby knives, or traditional scalpels. The former are less versatile, the latter much sharper but also much more fragile and difficult to find. These work fine if you're already comfortable with them, but an Xacto clone is cheap and already perfect if you're not. A (dry) palette. This can be literally any flat smooth impermeable object that you're not going to knock onto the floor. Plastic, glass, or hard ceramic are all fine. Use a lid, use an old plate, it really does not matter. A friend of mine uses a little bubble-popping toy from the dollar store since you can just pop the paint residue out after it dries. Whatever works for you. Something to hold water. For example, a cup that you won't knock over. Disposable ones work, although paper cups soak through surprisingly quickly, and tiny plastic cups aren't too stable. Coffee cups work great but maybe not if you also drink coffee while painting. You can start with one container but you'll quickly want more. You'll want a cleaning pot, then a separate pot for clean water to dilute paint, and a separate container or two for metallic paints or texture paints (because they have particles that can transfer to and contaminate other paints). A handful of disposable styluses. Toothpicks, pieces of sprue, pieces of plastic rod, it really doesn't matter. You will want stir-sticks and glue applicators and scraping sticks that you can also throw away if they are fouled or broken. Junk brushes. You don't need these right away but you will ruin brushes, and you should save them anyway. There are lots of jobs that will probably or certainly ruin the brush you're using, but basically none of them require precise brushwork. Paper towel. You will go through so much of it. You also need glue and paint. GLUE Unless you're assembling fitted models (and most wargame models aren't), you'll need some kind of glue to build them. And even then, you probably still want it. By the way, don't try to attach a painted surface to anything. If you use superglue, you're simply attaching the coat of paint to the other object, so it will tear off easily. If you use plastic cement, it may not even form a bond. Scrape the paint off first. Super glue. Cyanoacrylate, CA glue, crazy glue, it goes by a bunch of names. It can glue together basically anything in the hobby to anything else. In particular, it will glue your fingertips to literally everything. Superglue becomes tacky almost instantly and dries very quickly. Plus, you can make it dry even faster using superglue accelerator. It does have a solvent, so it will destroy some materials, mainly foam. You can get superglue as a thicker gel or thinner liquid, for different handling properties, but they're both the same thing when they dry. Any name brand is more or less as good as another, and if your hobby store has their own storebrand, it's probably made by Bob Smith Industries, a reputable and ubiquitous generic manufacturer. Generic stuff from a dollar store or something is a crapshoot, though. Applying superglue directly from the tip of the bottle or tube is taking a risk. We all do it to save time and effort, but it's much more controllable if you apply it using a tool. Generally not a brush, as it will be instantly and permanently junked, but a toothpick or bit of sprue is fine. Acetone will take superglue off of pretty much any surface, including your skin, but melts plastic, dissolves paint, and ruins some surface finishes or clothes dyes. If you're using superglue with kids, bear in mind that superglue adheres to mucous membranes instantly. As a result, it can pose a choking hazard, and getting superglue in your nose (or huffing it) can cause nasty inhalation irritation. However, once dried, the hardened CA glue is generally safe. Plastic cement. Also known as model cement or model glue. This is a solvent that dissolves styrene plastic, allowing it to chemically weld two pieces of styrene plastic together. This results in a stronger bond, and the property of melting plastic has more uses than simply attaching pieces together. However, this (mostly) isn't glue, it's solvent, and only works if it has plastic to dissolve. As such, plastic cement can only attach a plastic model part directly to another plastic model part. (Not even all kinds of plastic; most plastic cements only affect the sort of plastic that opaque model parts are made of.) If the plastic is covered with dried superglue or paint, the cement won't work. If you want to attach metal, or resin, or literally anything else, you need to use superglue. This also comes in different consistencies, with somewhat different applications. Thin/extra-thin plastic cements are generally just solvent. The nice thing about them is that if you get the pieces you want to attach fitted together perfectly, you can form a perfect join with absolutely zero gap in between them, something you can't do with superglue. Extra-thin solvents also "wick" outward with just a light tap of the brush, covering a predictable amount of the surface with a thin layer through capillary action. Tamiya Extra Thin and Mr. Hobby Extra Thin are popular and can be found in pretty much scale modelling store these days. Revell Contacta Professional isn't quite as thin, but is nice if you prefer a metal needle applicator over a brush. (You can clear a blockage in a metal needle applicator with a smaller needle, a thin guitar string, or holding a lighter under the metal applicator if you're careful.) Thicker plastic cements are technically weak glues, as they have some resin mixed into the solvent. These work a bit more like superglue, so they are stickier, more forgiving, and can cross small gaps. However, they are considerably messier, and can leave permanent melt marks if they ooze out of a join. Testors and Revell are both reputable brands, and are sold in bottles with narrow applicators or else tubes. Plastic cement is, at the end of the day, mostly made of strong organic solvent, so it's toxic and stinks. You can get limonene plastic cement (sometimes simply sold as "non-toxic"), which isn't toxic and generally smells like oranges. It's slower to work, slower to dry, and doesn't form quite as strong a bond, but "cooler" cement can also be situationally useful. Limonene comes as thicker cement from Testors, or extra thin from Tamiya or Mr. Hobby. Other glues are not strong enough, not controllable enough, or too bulky to use when assembling miniatures. PVA glue, the white glue kids use in school, is hand for attaching porous materials to each other, and okay for some tasks working on terrain or bases. There are a lot of uses for it in modelling but it's not something you can use to assemble model parts. Other hours, like hot glue, epoxy glue, rubber cement, and such are only useful when building terrain at best. There are some with specific gimmicky uses (like non-solvent-free Uhu glue) but generally they will just make a big mess that ends up in the unspiration thread. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Feb 29, 2024 |
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PAINT - this guide isn't finished yet and is full of my hot takes so feel free to post opinions/corrections For miniatures, most painters in wargaming chiefly use water-based acrylic paint. It's easy to thin, easy to clean, carries pigment well, and dries to a tough but flexible coat. Buying your first paints For your first paint, pick a brand you can buy by the bottle in person, generally at a game store, scale modeling store, or maybe even an RC store or model train store. It doesn't matter if it's one of the really good ones: you want to be able to see what you're buying before buying it. Try not to get too attached to Citadel paint if you have any alternative. It costs more than most brands and it's no longer even one of the nicer brands around for most applications. If you're going to buy a starter set, pick a box with no more than about a dozen bottles. More than that and you're going to find that any savings from buying the box is offset by too many paints you will never, ever use. There's generally little benefit to buying a $100 or more case of paint, let alone a several-hundred-dollar pack of all of the paints in a line, unless there's nowhere local to see and check paints before buying them or you want to jump into one of the brands that sells mostly online. Likewise, you should generally skip paint sets that are some kind of brand collaboration, like WizKids, D&D, Cyberpunk Red, or Zombicide. While sometimes they're okay, most of the time these sets are overpriced, have cost-cutting measures like smaller bottles, have oddball color names you have to look up in a chart to match to the manufacturer's regular paints, or have hues you can only get in that set. If you really, truly, just want a link to a newbie-friendly paint set, get Vallejo Basic USA Colors 70.140. Don't spend more than 40 USD/GBP/Euro unless you're reading this in 2027 or something. There's going to be several thousand  on types of paints after this, but don't worry too much about it. Outside of a handful of gimmicky products, there's no paint so bad you can't paint with it. Even cheap and crappy craft paint will do the job, you'll just have to apply more thin coats of it. Brands and basic paints Citadel is Games Workshop's brand, and noted for its ubiquity, consistent quality, and significantly higher price. Citadel paints are almost never actually bad - although some are gimmicks with extremely narrow applications - but they are consistently 25-50% more expensive per ml than their competitors, with some specialist paints costing a lot more. Plus, rather than the standard dropper bottles, they come in flip-top bottles with a little ledge under the bottle cap that serves as a palette. That's handy if you're a space-constrained 12-year-old, but mostly annoying to anyone who uses proper palettes, especially since the caps inevitably crust up with dried paint. You can transfer Citadel paints to dropper bottles, but that's more expense and potential mess. Citadel has a half-dozen lines of different types of paint, and most of the successful specialist lines are described below. Their basic paints are Base, paints with their traditional creamy, thick consistency and satin finish. Layer is less heavily pigmented and has a smoother, thinner consistency. Citadel Dry paints are as thick as half-dried paint, almost a paste, and a weird bad experiment in drybrush-specific paint. In the last few years, Citadel's competitors in water-based acrylics have really stepped up their quality, often launching new lines on Kickstarter or selling exclusively online. They have smoother, often-thinner paints with better opacity and flow, as well as different finishes. Citadel is no longer the best around, and there's no clear runaway winner among these new paints. A non-exhaustive list of top-quality new or revamped lines: Pro Acryl is the store brand of UK chain Monument Hobbies, and set the curve for all the recent revamps. If Pro Acryl paints aren't the only first choice now, then at least they were the first choice first. Pro Acryl paints are very thin - almost runny - but very intensely pigmented. Their consistency makes them a bit of an acquired taste, but the quality is outstanding, including their (sadly few) washes and metallic paints. In fact, the line doesn't really have most of the gimmicky specialist paints, nor as many different colors as some. But you know how to mix and blend paint, right? AK Interactive 3rd Gen is a gigantic line mainly aimed at historical wargamers and scale modelers. The paints are smooth and quite matte, and the very large line includes lots of historical color-matches for uniforms, livery, and camouflage schemes. I don't know why nobody ever seems to mention them, they're another top-of-the-line brand. In any case, don't just look for the AK Interactive brand: their Real Colors line are solvent-based acrylic, a different kind of paint entirely, and they sell lots of specialized paints for specific scale modelling applications. Two Thin Coats is the prototypical Kickstarter paint line, and is the the personal brand of Duncan Rhodes, painting youtuber formerly at Games Workshop. As such, his line is closely based on Citadel, albeit often imitating older and well-loved hues or paint lines that GW has since discontinued. Two Thin Coats is heavily marketed - any youtuber you watch probably has a gratis set of it - but it does live up to the hype. The paints are quite opaque, smooth in application, and matte when they dry. In particular, the entire line is very consistently high quality: 2TC doesn't have any bummer colors, or goofy specialist paints that don't quite work out. Vallejo Game Color is a long-time brand that recently (in 2022-2023) revamped their entire line to catch up, and the results are excellent. The paints have a smoother, thinner consistency than most (although not quite to Pro Acryl's level) and dry mostly matte. VGC is a Goldilocks line, not too big and not too small, with a decent set of specialized lines which are mostly good. The only weak point is their metallics, which are quite mediocre. Incidentally, Vallejo Game Color is one of the older lines still around. There are plenty of bottles of old VGC still floating around as a result, and while the quality is fine, they don't have the consistency or coverage of new VGC. The old bottles have "GAME Color" in thin script serif font, while the new ones say "Vallejo GAME COLOR" in squarish bold sans-serif. Scale75 is another high-quality brand that I know basically nothing about other than it's generally great. At the time I'm writing this, Army Painter's new Fanatic line is getting good reviews, on par with the other new-generation paints, but is only available in a several-hundred-dollar box with most of the entire line. There are other popular lines, of course. Ammo by Mig (it's his name, not an acronym) is a high-quality water-soluble line, honestly on par with the above, but has a consistency aimed more at airbrush users. Vallejo Model Color is a large line of high-quality but relatively muted colors, with a fairly thick consistency and many, many historical match hues. Reaper Bones and Reaper Master Series are thicker and relatively middling-consistency paints, respectively, from longtime miniature manufacturer Reaper, and dry fairly matte. These are quite good lines, on par with Citadel and all significantly cheaper by ml. Other basically fine brands include Warcolours, Green Stuff World's paints, and Coat d'Arms. None of them are super popular or remarkable for their quality, but they're better than cheap craft paint. The only common hobby brands to be somewhat wary of are P3 and Army Painter Warpaints. P3 is (was?) distributed by Privateer Press. Due to that company's various woes, there's a lot of very old or somewhat questionable paint bottles floating around. Check bottles of P3 for bad separation or drying out before buying them. Army Painter Warpaints was AP's line before Fanatic, and it was just okay even before standards started creeping up. The washes and metallics and spray paints are all decent to great, but the regular Warpaints are mediocre. Contrast and other speed paints Contrast paints are magic. They're translucent paints that promise to let you paint a model with just one coat of paint. The way it works is that when you apply a Contrast paint to a light-colored base coat, the Contrast paint medium wicks into recesses and flows slightly downward, forming natural shadows and highlights. It started with Citadel Contrast, but it's such an ingenious idea that several other manufacturers copied Citadel, and at a significantly lower price. You do need to be careful to make sure it doesn't pool on large flat areas, but otherwise the paint can do a lot of the work for you. A popular way to use Contrast paints is "slapchopping." Apply a black basecoat (often a black primer), drybrush the raised details with white or else lightly airbrush the raised and upper sections of the model with white (known as a "zenithal" highlight), then apply the Contrast paints over that. The contrast between the black and white make the translucent color and pooling even more effective. (This is grisaille underpainting if you went to art school, and the techniques of grisaille carry over. If you want to carefully apply light and shade in stark white and black before overpainting with translucent paints, you can totally do that.) Citadel Contrast is the most popular of these lines, to the degree that there really isn't any other name for them besides "contrast" paints. And, gonna be honest, it really is the nicest of all of them. It just costs 50% more per ml compared to the competitors. Army Painter Speedpaint 2.0 is just as nice as Citadel Contrast at two-thirds the cost, and can be used the same way. Plus, they have an absolutely gigantic line, bigger even than Citadel and Vallejo. However, they're just slightly buggy, for lack of a better word. They will reactivate Liquitex inks, for example, making a muddy mess of the Speedpaint and the ink. And before applying a very light opaque color over a relatively dark Speedpaint, you should wait for an hour-ish for the darker coat to dry. None of these are dealbreakers, and it's vastly improved over the original Speedpaint line, but Speedpaint 2.0 can be a bit temperamental. Vallejo Xpress Color, part of their Vallejo Game Color line, is also high-quality, and about as cheap as AP SP2.0. They mostly aren't as intensely pigmented as Citadel Contrast, and are a bit more transparent. This is neither bad nor good in and of itself. It won't overwhelm slapchop/grisaille highlights as much, but it might need a second coat for the full color intensity. This is strictly a matter of taste. VXC Intense paints are as pigmented as Citadel, but they only come in a few colors. Green Stuff World sells a line of "dipping inks" that work like Contrast. I've never tried them, but I'm given to understand they work well enough. You can't beat the price, at less than half of AP SP2.0 and VXC and less than a third of Contrast. You can just tell where the corners were cut, with less dye making for less intense coverage. AVOID Army Painter Speedpaint, without the 2.0, looks fine, but it tends to "reactivate" or "re-wet" after drying, if you simply paint over them with a wet brush or another paint. There's some wet-blending and pinwashing tricks you can do with these, but if you just want them for painting, they're a pain in the rear end. Anything you'd want to do with them can probably be done more easily with retarder medium or oil washes anyway. Army Painter also has metallic paints in both the Speedpaint and Speedpaint 2.0 lines, and I don't see the point. They're metallic paints. They don't do the Contrast thing. They're perfectly fine metallic paints but you can't really drybrush with them so they're just inferior metallic paints. Maybe I'm missing something. There are two brands of mediocre Contrast clones, and to discuss why they're mediocre, we need to talk about what Contrast is and how it works. Contrast, VXC, SP2.0, these are all technically inks. They create a translucent filter that darkens as you add additional coats or allow them to pool. This is as opposed to paints, which aren't translucent the same way. As you apply a thicker coat of traditional paint, eventually you just get a smooth coat of the color of the paint's pigment. Warcolours Antithesis and Scale75 Instant Colors are traditional paints with a Contrast-like medium that is supposed to make the pigment pool in recesses. And it does, for the most part, but you end up with bright solid color in the recesses, rather than the shadows you get with inks. It just doesn't work. Obviously even goofy and bad paints are useful for something, but if you like this look, you can just mix your own regular paints with Citadel Contrast Medium or Army Painter Speedpaint 2.0 Medium. There's little reason to bother with these. Washes, shades, inks, glazes, and dips Acrylic washes go by a lot of names: washes, shades, glazes, and occasionally dips. At the end of the day, they're all essentially the same thing: paint diluted to the point of translucence. The difference between the different brands is in the amount and type of coloring agent, and in the physical properties of the paint medium. All washes will tend to pool in recesses and draw downward due to surface tension and gravity. (Technically, Contrast paints and clones are also washes, just a particular kind.) Washes are liquid skill. They will automatically run into the recesses and undersides of your miniatures, creating natural shadows or underlayers. They're especially good for representing corrosive or dirty weathering, as recessed areas collect filth while it gets brushed off of raised areas. Everyone should own a black and/or brown wash! Nuln Oil and Agrax Earthshade, Citadel's black and (slightly greenish) brown washes, are famous, but don't feel like you need those by name: every brand has a good black and brown wash these days. Washes do come in a lot of variations. The medium can tend to run more or less into recesses through capillary action or downwards because of gravity: the ones that tend to run more into crevices have a "watery" feel to them, while the ones that run less tend to "stain" the raised areas more. Some washes use opaque pigment, some use translucent dyeing agents. (Contrast and most of its clones mostly use dye or a mix.) Different brands call their washes different things. For those that have multiples, "ink" usually implies - cease died in the middle of writing this Metallics Metallic paints have little reflective flakes mixed into them, giving the paint a metallic or iridescent appearance. Terrain paints Airbrush paints Other gimmicks Mediums Primer Non-hobby acrylics Other types of paint Polyurethane paint is technically acrylic. But it's tougher, much more flexible and adhesive, and very self-leveling (which means an uneven, sloppy coat will tighten as it dries to make a smooth, even surface). However, it's a pain in the rear end to mix or dilute, and doesn't tend to be opaque with a single coat. The main use for it is as a primer paint for your miniatures, as described above. There are more-heavily-pigmented polyurethane paints, but they're mainly for RC and scale model car applications, and don't have great properties for miniatures except as primer. Solvent-based acrylics are similar to water-based ones, but use a solvent in addition to or in lieu of water. Alcohol-based acrylics can be applied with a brush and usually cleaned up or diluted with water, but they're finickier and solvents are better for some solutions. They're most popular with airbrush users, where their consistency and drying time is perfect, and you're wearing a mask so you won't have to smell them anyway. These are generally aimed at scale modelers and gunpla builders; Tamiya is one of the most popular brands. Enamel paints make tough, thin, hard coats. However, they're really expensive, have to be thinned or cleaned with solvents, are hard to remove, and the paint itself is basically toxic waste. You can get the little square Testors jars or the Humbrol tins, but unless you grew up using them, there's no call to start. Some popular specialist paints are enamel, though, like the (much-imitated) AK Streaking Grime. Oil paints require entirely different painting techniques from acrylics. Mostly they're used for washes or filters over an acrylic basecoat. Again, these need to be cleaned with proper solvent. A little bit of black or sienna oil paint heavily thinned with white spirit is is a great way to make your models look rainstreaked or filthy, and if you overdo it, you can simply remove the excess paint with a clean brush wetted with solvent. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Apr 29, 2024 |
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Cease to Hope posted:my usual green stuff tools: Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Feb 29, 2024 |
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Links to non-video guides
Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Feb 29, 2024 |
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Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Feb 29, 2024 |
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Feb 29, 2024 00:26
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random effortpost dumpSpanish Manlove posted:What paint did you use on the second model's pants? It looks pretty spot on for blue jeans Cthulu Carl posted:Vallejo Model Air USAF Light Blue ( 71.111) then washed with Drakenhof Nightshade good rear end advice for painting jeans if you ask me Cease to Hope posted:Speaking of which, a while back I found an incredible guide to using plastic cement, both to make bonds but also a bunch of secondary applications. And, for once, it's not a gd video. Cease to Hope posted:I dunno why I wrote a whole giant effortpost for stripping paint but here it is. Cease to Hope posted:decals on textiles really need weathering to look good, and weather differently from paint on a hard surface. Cease to Hope posted:Firearms aren't like most steel objects and weather in a counterintuitive way. Steel parts on a gun that will be exposed to the elements are generally plated with a mostly non-reactive metal, or else chemically treated to passivize and increase the hardness of the steel parts. This means, despite still looking metallic, they wear more like a painted metal object, because they have a coating that can abrade, nick, wear down from friction, etc. Cease to Hope posted:Tossing out some hobby gift advice for Eargesplitten or whoever else is encouraging a new hobbyist, in a form that can be handed off to parents or relatives: richyp posted:Agreed, thanks to Leperflesh's post I already have a better understanding of the arcane workings of cameras. Note: this is an effortpost from 2018 and some of these are discontinued Avenging Dentist posted:Below is a list of the best-loved paints from any range. This list is compiled from posts both here and on other forums (mainly CMON), plus a few recommendations from various painting videos. I broke it up by fairly-arbitrarily putting each one into a basic color, and within each color, they're sorted roughly from light to dark. A Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 08:08 on Apr 14, 2024 |
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indicates paints that lots of people love. If there are paints people think I missed, let me know (in the thread or via PM) and I'll add them.
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Remember: https://youtu.be/RbhcRKsRwFM?t=71 PS if you want me to quote/link your effortpost please link it for me tia Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Feb 29, 2024 |
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Feb 29, 2024 00:26
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I am busily adding new crap to the OP as I go
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Feb 29, 2024 07:35
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GreenBuckanneer posted:Think more Gargoyles Cartoon and less Weeping Angels Those cartoons are painted with acrylics, so you can apply a lot of the design techniques directly. Solid blocks of even color, shapes defined by solid exaggerated under-shadows, lines/seams/parts separated by hard black lines. (Heavy pinwashing can help but maybe you just want to apply opaque acrylic black.) The main problem is that to pull off that design, you need clean fields of color with only a few defining detailed parts. Most minis aren't designed like that. So you'll need to think about what minis you use, or else how you want to alter/kitbash them to make them benefit from those techniques.
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Mar 3, 2024 06:54
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Depends on the minis and what you want to or can do with them!
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Mar 3, 2024 08:21
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stoopidmunkey posted:Hey thread, hoping for some help. I got a satin finish when I meant to go matte so I’ve got shiny space dwarves. If I just hit them with matte over top will that work? If not, anyone know how to either remove finish without paint or how to get rid of the shine? painting matte or gloss varnish/medium will give you a good matte or gloss look unless you're intending to go ultramatte or super high shine.
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Mar 5, 2024 19:23
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Lock Knight posted:As I understand, gloss varnish is quite durable, as well, so having a matt coat on top of it gives you the best of both. It's kinda the other way around: durable varnishes tend to be glossy, especially when they're non-hobby products. there are more and more good-to-great durable matte hobby vanishes these days, they just cost more than a cheap gloss coat and a coat of matte medium. if you're buying varnish sold specifically for miniatures (Citadel, AP, Vallejo, GSW, etc.), there's no reason not to get matte, though. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Mar 6, 2024 |
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Mar 6, 2024 15:57
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SiKboy posted:Why? I've not found any particular drawback so far (although I'm ready to be corrected). unfixed pigment powders are literally dust, so they get brushed or blown or shaken off of dry surfaces
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Mar 6, 2024 17:29
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AndyElusive posted:Glazes of Word Bearers Red to add spot warmth (like to cheeks, lips/mouth, nose) this is good advice for any human skin tone that isn't makeup. i've found any time my paint mix stops looking like skin, it means i washed out all of the red/orange
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Mar 7, 2024 17:08
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Nessus posted:Should I thin paint-on primer or is that the one where I should just use it more or less as is? no, it already forms very thin coats
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Mar 8, 2024 15:04
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microset is very marginal for wargame miniature painting. you don't need it and probably won't notice any benefit from using it, especially if you gloss varnish a surface before applying decals. microsol is the magic stuff. i wouldn't try to apply a decal on anything but a flat plane without it, and even then it will just seem to melt the decal in place, making it look so much better and more natural.
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Mar 8, 2024 23:56
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Vallejo Xpress is a bit more translucent than Contrast. It might work better?
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Mar 9, 2024 03:27
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Bark! A Vagrant posted:If you haven't seen it, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBDVPoNXyVI i need to remember to put this in the OP
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Mar 12, 2024 22:58
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SuperKlaus posted:Cool puke. A knife. There's no good solvent solution that doesn't involve removing and submerging a piece, because the edges of solvent application will be nastier than whatever error you were removing. In my experience, you can carefully remove the paint with a tool, or else remove and submerge the part. Anything else will look like a mess.
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Mar 15, 2024 07:17
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grassy gnoll posted:If you want a set of pre-constructed triads (shade, base color, highlight) straight from the company, that's harder. I think you're mostly stuck with Reaper, Army Painter, and Two Thin Coats. VGC and AK 3rd Gen also have similar color groups, and sell four-packs of linked paints to show it off.
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Mar 18, 2024 20:35
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what if all i have is a syringe full of drain cleaner, will that sufficeBark! A Vagrant posted:Not sure whether to go for an eye of Sauron type-look or more like an animal eye. personally i find just a regular human eye draws focus very well while being disconcerting I really like what you have done with this blightcrawler btw Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Mar 22, 2024 |
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Mar 22, 2024 04:40
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Nessus posted:In terms of painting technique or how I treat it, do I need to do anything special with paint-on primer black, or is it basically similar to other acrylics? whose paint-on primer black? some are self-leveling (so you can be kind of sloppy), some are just tough black paint
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Mar 23, 2024 03:28
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that's self-leveling. don't fill in gaps but don't worry about applying it smoothly.
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Mar 23, 2024 03:49
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Bark! A Vagrant posted:I'm calling it here and moving onto basing. I'm content with the verdigris and still unhappy with the rust, but I've spent enough time on it I think it's time to move on. I've got plenty more death guard to paint so it won't be my last chance to paint some rust. After basing I'll need to figure out how to take a picture where the detail on the eye is visible without having the the stippling and the verdigris look extremely textured. this rules btw like, you are going to get better and do work closer to what is in your mind's eye, certainly, but all anyone else can see is what you've made, which is excellent
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Mar 23, 2024 08:01
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mellonbread posted:Painted my first miniature: a Leonidas smartgunner from SYNDICAT, along with a C4T multipurpose robot. I love them
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Mar 25, 2024 04:56
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NMM allows you to control light and shade in a way that reflective flake paints generally only approximate. That isn't to say you have to use NMM to reach a contest-winning level - many GD winners do not! - but rather that you need to go beyond simply letting the paint do all the work much of the time.
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Mar 25, 2024 20:52
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AndyElusive posted:Ya OSL and NMM look to be the things you need to absolutely fuckin nail no questions asked when it comes to going for a Golden Demon these days. You don't need to nail OSL, either; most models don't have a source of radiant light on the model or the base. You do absolutely need to nail lighting, whether it's from a torch, glowing plasma, or simply the (implied) noonday sun. OSL just challenges lighting techniques that don't think much about the source of light, or treat every model as diffusely lit from every direction.
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Mar 25, 2024 21:44
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other posters covered some of the basics but some more tips to add: acrylic inks (which includes basically every acrylic wash, ink, shade, or contrast clone) are generally not designed to do this. however, oil washes will do a very nice job of forming filthy filters or grimy streaks. a coat of acrylic gloss varnish and a bit of carbon black or burnt sienna oil paint diluted with white spirit is all you need to experiment freely. (there are a great many readymade products that are basically dilute oil paint!) if you don't like the look, just reduce or remove it with clean white spirit on a brush. weathering scale model tanks and other military/industrial vehicles can get so involved that it's basically its own hobby. almost every technique, tool, and premade product from that hobby transfers over from scale modeling to (fantasy) wargaming. looking up guides to weathering scale model tanks should offer up plenty of info to work with. or, at least, a good start to ask for more specific advice.
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Mar 27, 2024 03:09
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Bark! A Vagrant posted:https://www.warhammer-community.com/2024/03/24/golden-demon-2024-winners-revealed-at-adepticon/ i don't know how they score but all three of those strike me as better compositions than what they're compared to. on the same level technically but clearer lines of movement and focus
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Mar 27, 2024 23:12
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He is r- oh. False alarm, it's just a bunch of mari lwyd jokers in the graveyard again.  I can see a hundred tiny flaws but you have to tie it off sometime. And I'm pretty happy with this little Underworlds team.
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Apr 1, 2024 01:22
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Ominous Jazz posted:I'm really happy with how this turned out! kick-rear end scheme for a kick-rear end team
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Apr 2, 2024 09:46
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SuperKlaus posted:Is LA Totally Awesome safe to put down my sink? yeah, it's a soap. Flipswitch posted:Is pigment binder mostly thinned down pva? no, it's some kind of paint medium, enamel or acrylic. depending on the brand, it can be self-leveling, have retardants, and or have matting agents. PVA would kind of suck, it's not very self-leveling even if you thin it down
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Apr 4, 2024 04:52
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great big cardboard tube posted:Super long and not informative post, tl;dr is if you want to help me out look at my list and tell me if I'm stupid or could make better choices. Everything you picked ranges from an outrageous deal (that Dominion box) to essentially fine. If you're not tied to Amazon for some reason: That VGC set is basically the perfect kind of thing I want to recommend to people but it's many years old at this point, and hobby acrylics have gone through a real race to improve their paint quality. Instead, I recommend this, because it has the new, nicer VGC paints. When the Army Painter Fanatic starter comes out, I'd recommend that instead I suppose. AK 3rd Gen has an okay starter but only if you're paying that price for it and not the inexplicable $80 it apparently goes for in USD. Likewise Scale75 FnG Basic 1 and Basic 2. In addition to basic colors, you want at least a neutral silver metallic, a black ink/shade/wash, and a brown ink/shade/wash. There's nothing magic about a particular brand's washes, so don't feel like you need Nuln Oil or Agrax in particular. I use AP Dark Tone and Soft Tone but honestly use whatever brand you can get at your hobby store. This is something you go through a lot of. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 02:58 on Apr 5, 2024 |
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Apr 5, 2024 02:16
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Expanding on the above: The ideal starter for wargame miniature painting imo would be a white/near-white, a solid black, a pure red, pure yellow, pure blue, a dark brown that's within the range of human skin tone, a neutral khaki/drab, a green of some sort, an orange of some sort, a peach or pink, a brown ink, a (near-)black ink, a neutral or bright metallic silver, and a hard-wearing and self-leveling matte or satin varnish. It's weird how hard it is to find a starter like this! I know of sets you can technically still find, like Army Painter Warpaints and Vallejo Game Color, but they're discontinued lines. And just look how old that old VGC paint looks. Citadel's AOS3 "Paints & Tools" set is surprisingly well-rounded but either already cancelled or very soon to be. (The 40K 10e equivalent is an eccentric mix of blue, purple, and brown.) I'd really like to point new people to one of the new-generation acrylic brands, but Vallejo and AP are working through total overhauls, Citadel isn't really the best around any more, the other Euro brands tend to be ruinously expensive anywhere else, and the Kickstarter-focused brands don't sell anything with a good selection of basic colors that is less than $100. It's frustrating that there isn't a paint set large enough to justify ordering by mail but not some massive "here's every paint in the line!" nonsense or a box that is just 15 shades of orange.
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Apr 5, 2024 03:34
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Spanish Manlove posted:Pro-acryl has some nice starter sets, and even has a bulk buy discount that basically lets you make your own starter set out of the paints you want. It's generally better to have an idea of what you want to paint before buying paints as most of the time with the starter kits you'll use 6/8 of the paints and never find a good use for the other 2, effectively eliminating the discount of buying the bundle. i do recommend people avoid brands they can't buy locally, because you'll run out of different paints at different times and it's easier to look at a line on a rack than online imo. i checked pro-acryl's starter sets before and they kind of suck. the starter set is $75 for 12 paints (normally priced $4.65-5.40) with eccentric color choices and a set of three taklon brushes. the base set is $100 and the kind of big box i was trying to avoid. the signature series and expansions are a sweet spot for someone who already has the basics to give p-a a try but their weirdly overpriced starter is such a miss for new people. good tip about the bulk discount if you order direct from monument hobbies though.
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Apr 5, 2024 19:11
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Nancy posted:My one big issue is the metallics don't seem great, tried some Vallejo instead and I had the same sort of issues where the metallic either wasn't very shiny, or was shiny+speckled in a very obvious way. Out of what I've tried I've only ever been happy with GW metallics, but I hate their pots. vallejo metal color is incredible but pricey at about $8-10 for a 35ml bottle. so, like, half the price of citadel per ml, lol. it uses aluminum flakes instead of mica, and you really can tell the difference, especially if you put in the work to make your metals pop. (paint over a surface with the tone and finish you want, varnish the metals separately according to the finish you want them to have, etc.) it's vallejo's ripoff of alclad II, at a higher cost but without the finickiness and toxicity of nitro lacquer paint. the main disadvantage of that line is that they have a muted gold and a muted copper and everything else is various different shades of silver. vallejo game color and vallejo model color metallics have always been weirdly bad compared to the rest of the line, albeit with a few exceptions (VGC tinny tin is still great, and VMC bronze is this great bronze with a greenish cast.) even the new VGC line has the same problem. what's weird is that vallejo mecha, their airbrush line aimed at gunpla and anime model builders, has excellent metallics. Ominous Jazz posted:are the turbo dork paints anything? my local store has HEAPS on clearance no their metallics are have bad opacity and colors so weird they're hard to find a use for, and the turboshifts are incredibly finicky and never seem to look good unless you use them to paint an entire object. i haven't tried the zenishifts but i feel like i gave TD their fair chance. i'd give bottles a shot for fooling around for, like, a buck. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Apr 5, 2024 |
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Apr 5, 2024 19:36
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Super Waffle posted:I like the bit about demons being scared as hell of them. this correctly implies that C-3PO is a demon
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Apr 8, 2024 03:54
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great big cardboard tube posted:Also I keep hearing their pro acryl white is the best out there but is there any particular color they suck at and I should find another brand for or are they just universally pretty good? Pro Acryl and Two Thin Coats famously do not sell a bad bottle of paint. The only paints that come with caveats from Pro Acryl are some of the influencer sets, and that is because some of them are unusual (eg super matte, translucent) and not because they are flawed.
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Apr 8, 2024 18:58
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