Technique

AdeptiCon 2014 – Thursday, Freehand Class

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.

  1. 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.
  2. Avoid really contrasting colours, otherwise #1 above will be harder.
  3. Use a reference. For my Herald, I drew out the design. For others, find a photo online.
  4. 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!
  5. It’s ok to mess up or waver your line a bit – you can go over it with the base colour to fit it.
  6. Focus on one side of a thin line first – you can fix the other side.
  7. 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.
  8. Paint thinner, as it’s easier to fix mistakes.
  9. 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.
  10. Brown/grey looks better for text than black.

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