This weekend of Masterclass Painting is about vehicles. We’re painting a Dark Eldar Helion glider thing (no rider). This morning started at 9am, and we immediately got into base coating, shading and highlighting this model. We had lunch in the middle and at about 1pm we got into the meat of the new material – various weathering techniques. After dinner we talked about airbrushing for a few hours and then ended the evening, exhausted, at 9pm.
Tomorrow we start again at 9am and I think we’re going to get into basing. But for now, hit the jump and we’ll take a look at some of what we did today!
This first photo is the final result at 1pm. After looking at my paints and discarding the colours/shades that I had already painted last week, and those which Mathieu said we shouldn’t paint, I was left with a really dark blue colour that I didn’t want to paint. I walked down the stairs to find a new colour and was confronted by the paint tray…lost and bewildered, the store manager said “Jason just bought Meredius Blue” and I made a snap decision to copy Jason. 😛 Thankfully we shaded and highlighted in different colours – I did a darker blue called Cygnar Blue Base. Highlighted in Ryn Flesh. This task went exactly as last week – lots of water, lots of layers, clean up your splotches. It was very similar to how the metallic painting went – you can see in this photo tha tmost shadows are touching a highlight where they cross an edge. Where a highlight touches a highlight, we did a strong edge highlight to provide a strong contrast between the two panels.
Onto the weathering!
The first technique we used was a stippled dent/chip in the paint. Take a piece of foam and put a little bit of Charadon Granite on it. Wipe most of the paint off and then dab it on the surface. You can see in the photo that I forgot to dab originally and “pulled” on the foam, creating those streaks on the right of the wing. After some prompting I figured it out and dabbed on the left.
After that, take some watered down White and paint it on the “bottom” of the chip. Watered down black on the “top” of the chip. The idea being that if you imagine a concave dent in a semi-vertical surface, the light would come down from the top and land on the bottom of the chip, while the top of the chip would be in shadow because it is parallel to the light source. I think it looks pretty good!
The next technique was an edge chip. Paint white on it, then paint the Charadon Granite inside the white. Simple.
The line shown in the middle of the wing is a bullet streak, from a bullet grazing along the wing. I think it looks a little silly, probably because it runs along the entire length of the wing, which isn’t really realistic. Mask off a straight line along the wing, then paint the white, then the Charadon Granite inside the white. Pull the mask off and you’re done.
He showed us how to use a Liquid Mask to mask off round areas, but we didn’t get to do it ourselves so I don’t have any photos.
Now things get crazy! We pulled out the oil paints. Oil has a few interesting properties:
- It takes hours to dry. So you have plenty of time to work with it.
- It rubs off easily with a paper towel or brush covered in paint thinner.
- You can do most of the work with models with 6 colours: Titanium White, Cadmium Yellow, Prussian Blue, Lamp Black, Burnt Sienna, and Viridian Hue.
We started by gloss varnishing our models. This worried me, because I don’t like shiny, but it was apparently necessary to keep the oil from getting a textured look from the mat finish of the existing paint. We used an oil-less turpentine, which doesn’t stink but which can still hurt your brain from the fumes.
We took a paintbrush and brushed on a little dot of each of three colours: white, yellow and blue. In the photo below I didn’t do it perfectly – the dots were supposed to be spread around, not clumped up in little groups. But it didn’t matter since you can start over easily. Take an inch-wide flat brush, dip it in thinner and then pull the paint across the wing front to back. It creates a lovely streak! I did this a few times before I was happy with the results.
Another technique that blew our minds – black lining. Usually this takes a long time, with a lot of patience. Using oil paints you can do it in minutes! Thin some black paint so that it’s really runny. Put it on a brush and lightly touch the brush to a recessed area. The black paint will run through the recess using capillary action and will easily fill the area you’re painting!
We used the Burnt Sienna to create an oil leak. Pull the paint away from the leak, forming a V.
After a few hours you can use a varnish coat to seal in the paint.
After that we went for dinner. Came back an hour and a bit later and talked about airbrushing a lot. I’m going to put the airbrush stuff into it’s own post since I have a ridiculous amount of notes on this. 🙂
Thanks for reading!
No Comments