Miniatures Painting and Michael Lonsdale Appreciation Thread

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Miniatures Painting and Michael Lonsdale Appreciation Thread

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

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.

Yeah, this is quite common for miniatures that are going to be gaming pieces and I've seen it referred to as a bullet varnish.

One thing to remember about Matte varnishing is that it'll knock back the shininess of any metallics you've got on there. A common solution tends to be drybrushing a bit of the metallic back over it and then if you're worried about the shine rubbing off you can brush paint some satin or gloss varnish over for protection.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2024 01:28

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 12:20

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Failson posted:

I haven't a lot of success witht the gemstone paints or contrast over silver.

What has always worked for me is brushing slightly thinned Tamiya Clear Colors over silver or gold. GW clears work in a pinch, but I have a harder time getting the coat consistent.

Yeah, the Tamiya clears over bright silver is what I like to use. It also works great for Zaku mono-eyes and cameras on Gunpla.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2024 23:55

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

SuperKlaus posted:

What's a Clear Color paint? Do you have pictures of some results?

They�re solvent based acrylics (e.g. Tamiya Clear Red) that are pretty viscous and globby (think Blood for the Blood God) but they thin down nicely and are semi transparent almost like inks so they let the colour underneath them come through nicely.

Because of the solvent base you can get them much thinner without them breaking up (as long as you using a matching solvent-based acrylic thinner like Tamiya X20A) which means you can airbrush them on in multiple thin layers to build them up and get a nice candy coat scheme going on.

Because of their properties they also work amazingly over bright silver or gold to simulate lenses or cameras because they allow the shine to come through from the metallic underneath.

E: Here�s an example from Gunpla (which often uses old scale modelling tricks like this one): https://fichtenfoo.net/blog/making-and-painting-lenses-and-eyes

Mercurius fucked around with this message at 06:28 on Mar 10, 2024

# ¿ Mar 10, 2024 06:23

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

welcome 2 Clown Town posted:

Painted up Barney and Grimace and pretty pleased with how they came out.

Is doing a pin wash or enamel wash and wiping it off the best way to preserve smooth gradients laid down with an airbrush? I didn't slap on a layer of a dark acrylic wash because I felt that relaying on the colors would ruin the nice transitions I'd put in.

I prefer pin-washing the recesses because yeah, regular washes all over will usually filter the colour underneath to some degree. It also means you can do most of your basecoat and layer work with an airbrush to start, use the recess wash for shadows and then it's only a few highlights to finish up.

If you gloss varnish the model and then use oils thinned down a lot with white spirits the capillary action should pull the wash into the recesses without you having to do much (and you can tidy up with more white spirits if needed due to the gloss varnish protecting the layers underneath). The downside is that oils and white spirits take a while to dry but I usually only have an hour or two to paint at most so doing a pin wash and then coming back to it the next day works just great for me.

Cult of Paint are one of the biggest proponents for oil washing and they have a very informative video on recess washing which helped me a ton when I was getting back into painting last year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19h5wmt8pNU

# ¿ Mar 14, 2024 03:28

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Lostconfused posted:

Slowly plugging away at these lads. It's nothing special but I just have fun looking at them, also pleasantly surprised at how well they rank up.

That's because green is best.

On a related note I'm still impressed at just how spot on the Dawn of War voice acting was for the Orks (and everything else really). I'm pretty sure that like 20 years later my internal reading of anything Warhammer 40k related is still in the Dawn of War voices.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2024 04:46

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Kylaer posted:

Primed the base with my airbrush, which I should have done for the model itself, paint applies so much better than over rattlecan primer

There's probably a better mud tone than this but it's good enough.

Also I'm disproportionately proud of how the little 90-degree notches I edited into the base turned out, they define the front/side/rear arcs of the model.

I know rattlecan primer is cheaper and easier but I really do prefer doing the prime and basecoat stage through the airbrush. It takes humidity/weird weather conditions out of the picture and airbrushing ends up with such thin layers that there's basically no chance of obscuring any detail while still giving subsequent layers something to grip onto nicely.

I tend to use the Vallejo Mecha primers with a bit of thinner and both the black (if I'm doing regular acrylics and building up to a zenithal) or white (if I'm going to use mainly contrasts/inks or be painting gunpla armour panels) have been good for me. I admittedly do tend to use a basecoat after the primer layer as well depending on what I'm going to be doing (just because it takes hardly any time with an airbrush and lets me adjust the finish on the model without varnish) but honestly you can skip that.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2024 00:55

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Eej posted:

My first bloodletter! He's not unique but he's mine

e: the lack of definition around the eyes bugs me, I'm not sure what kind of wash I can stick in there without killing the magma colour, maybe a dark brown?

I think the sculpt is honestly the problem as they're mostly recessed sockets with the tiniest little point that's the actual eye. Short of making it a highly contrasting colour like blue/green which I think would look weird I think about the best you can hope for it potentially just highlighting the eye points in white and leaving it at that.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2024 01:21

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Yeast posted:

Not to yuck someone else�s yum, it�s just that I�m yet to see 28mm minis that look good with colour shift Metallics on them that aren�t purely based on the gimmick.

I bet it looks great on scale model cars

The only time I've seen them work well was the Votann Hearthkyn where someone used the metallic shifting paints for their visor sunglasses and it looked extremely cool.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2024 23:55

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

I�ve got a bottle of Mother Lode here somewhere and I was toying around with the idea of using it as the base armour colour (with gold trim and blue cloth) for either Stormcast or Custodes so I guess I�ll give that a try and report back if it works.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2024 00:02

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Lostconfused posted:

Tried airbrushing Vallejo's "Mecha Color" paint, and I don't like it. They say it's for airbrushing, and sure it kinda works, but it's airbrushing in the same way their primers are. You need a big nozzle and a lot of air pressure to get it to spray nicely, otherwise good luck getting the correct thinner ratio for whatever it is you're using.

I've had similar experiences. I really like the Mecha Colour black primer (50/50 mix with thinner and a tiny bit of flow improver is super smooth with great coverage) and the Mecha Matte varnish but my bottle of white primer and the actual white colour that I bought for doing Gunpla panels are both kind of garbage. Even after a few minutes on the vortex mixer and thinning to the same consistency the other colours I have use they have pretty poor coverage and tend towards dry tip even with extra flow improver.

I've settled on just using the black primer and then doing my basecoats with either Tamiya Acrylics (with their special thinner) or ProAcryl and Vallejo Metal/Model Colour with regular thinner and that seems to work for me.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2024 02:33

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Ominous Jazz posted:

I got some kroot today and i'm happy with how they came out. I painted the poncho pink first and it hit it with yellow to get that orange. i did the same thing with blue to get the kroot hound that color

And, a disaster! it finally happened!

Nice! Between your trick for that poncho material and the one for jeans a few pages ago I think I'm going to take a crack at some proper cowboy Skitarii soon.

And I feel you on the paint. I forgot that Scale 75s bottles are garbage that clogs incredibly easily and had a cap explosion from some Necro gold yesterday.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 02:29

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Wangsucker 69 posted:

Hey friends, my FLGS had a big sale over the weekend and they were selling all their Turbo Dork paints for a dollar, so I grabbed a bunch of them just for the gently caress of it.

They are all metallics and I have been using strictly Scale75 metallics thus far because they cover so well. These are the opposite, I'm not sure if there is a term for these as opposed to the Scale75 metallics in terms of coverage/coloring but these all seem very very thin.

Is this how most metallics are usually and any advice for using them effectively? I''m thinking maybe just having to layer them four or five times but that seems daunting for detailed stuff for a beginner like me. Just curious, TIA.

I've been experimenting with their old formula Mother Lode paint after someone asked about it and honestly I think the original paints (which are in the middle of being reformulated and is probably why they were discounted) are kind of bad even through an airbrush. They seem to rely on quite large mica flakes in order to get the sheen and by the time I'd put enough coats on to get the mother of pearl effect (which was about 5 thin coats through the airbrush) I was starting to have the medium the mica is suspended in start to clog details.

As Eej mentioned they don't brush on very well at all and they also need to be shaken a hell of a lot to actually get them to the point where they're approximately even. If you don't have an airbrush and vortex mixer I think they're probably a bit of a dud and even if you do they're not that great compared to just using a bright metal undercoat with clears on it.

# ¿ May 6, 2024 01:44

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 12:20

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

nessin posted:

When I bought my first bottles of paint (outside of Game Xpress and Speedpaint 2.0 to try out that specific style) I went with some Pro Acryl and Scale75. But as I only bought what I thought I'd need but actually didn't really know what I needed, mostly just buying something I thought I'd need but it turns out it didn't match the color in my mind or not realizing some small part was supposed to be a different thing than what I'd planned on using for that part, I thought if I'm going to do this long term I should just properly learn some basic color mixing and stick with a small subset of paints. Which then led to the rabbit hole of pigments and challenges of mixing miniature paints beyond simple highlights. Has been fun to learn even if nothing else and now I'm thinking of getting some Golden SoFlat paints (I did buy their cheaper starter set of six paints already) but while I was debating buying more I found a reference on reddit to using Jo Sonja paints, and have only found a couple other instances of people referencing them in conjunction with painting miniatures. Normally I'd just dismiss it at that point, but Jo Sonja paints are pretty drat cheap and appear (from the few discussions I found) to be of higher quality than basic cheap hobby craft paint. Considering the price of the Golden SoFlat small bottles if the Jo Sonja paints are passable if not especially great then I'll take it as a new painter considering the difference.

Being able to mix your own colours is absolutely a super valid way of painting (I do it all the time) but the main reason people like being able to use a premixed paint that's the right colour is consistency when painting a large batch of similar stuff (especially if it's not necessarily all at once).

This is also why people can get quite grumpy about paint reformulations since it might mean that if you run out of a specific paint and get a new bottle even though it's called the same thing in the same paint line it's actually got a new medium/pigment. In general newer formulations are "better" (as in they tend to have better coverage/stronger pigmentation) but the old formulations "flaws" might have actually been working to your advantage and you might not be able to reproduce what you did previously with the new stuff.

# ¿ May 8, 2024 07:43

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Miniatures Painting and Michael Lonsdale Appreciation Thread