Freehand
This was a good class to take from Chris Borer of Full Borer Miniatures. He was also really friendly, supportive and helpful!
I tried some freehand on my Herald of Nurgle a few months ago and wasn’t as happy with the results. I didn’t learn a lot of technique, but I did learn a few important things, starting with…
Patience, bitches.
That’s the biggest problem of it all. I lack patience when painting. I want it now, damn it. Doing this in a classroom atmosphere really helped – you have no where else to go, nothing else to do, so sitting and painting the red straight grey line over a red cloak for a half hour is something I can do easily. Doing it at home is much harder.
I learned a bunch of other useful things as well.
- Highlight up, but not to the top. Then do the freehand, then finish your highlighting. You can much more easily fix your mistakes by painting over with the base colour.
- Avoid really contrasting colours, otherwise #1 above will be harder.
- Use a reference. For my Herald, I drew out the design. For others, find a photo online.
- Make sure your reference is the right size. If it’s huge, and you have a small space you may not know that it won’t fit!
- It’s ok to mess up or waver your line a bit – you can go over it with the base colour to fit it.
- Focus on one side of a thin line first – you can fix the other side.
- For more complex designs, you can draw more than is required and then use the base colour to fill places in. His example was a complex celtic knot thing.
- Paint thinner, as it’s easier to fix mistakes.
- If you’re writing text, write it down on paper first in the right size and then divide it into sections. Plan those sections on the model and then paint in.
- Brown/grey looks better for text than black.
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