I noticed this evening that 7 days have gone by without me posting anything. Thankfully, it hasn’t been 7 days since I painted anything, but I somehow felt like there wasn’t anything to write about. I’ve made significant progress on the Temple Guard – only 2 more “major” layers to go before I start looking for mistakes/tiny details, but it doesn’t look (from afar) like I’ve made any progress. More on that later.
Tonight while painting I had a thought to post a few tips/tricks that might help someone reading this. Or might not. Since no one posts comments, I have no idea who my readership is or what their skill level is (maybe a poll in the future? :))
Water
Water is surprisingly important in painting. For years (decades…) I thought you could open up a paint pot and just start taking the paint and placing it on the model. Well…you can, but you aren’t going to get to smooth, even highlights without water.
The easiest process I can suggest looks like this:
- Put a colour on a palette. Add some water – enough that it flows, but not so much that it goes on too patchy. Patchy is ok, just not toooo patchy.
- Put that paint on the model. Make it sloppy, just waz it all over the place. You’ll clean it up later (you will clean it up, won’t you?)
- Find a wash that fits over it. Badab Black (unless yours sucks like mine) and Devlan Mud are common washes. No need to add water here. And again, just a sloppy coat over everything.
- Grab that first colour again and do the water thing again on your palette. You may even want it really watery, like patchy “that won’t cover anything” watery.
- Put only as much as you need for a single edge onto the tip of your paint brush. And with a gentle touch, apply that.
I can’t really say the amount of water I use. Last time I started with 2 brushes of Bleached Bone and then two brushes of water. Over time it dries and you add more, so the consistency I started with wasn’t the same as what I ended with.
If you get it right, what you’ll get is: 1 shit coat, 1 washed awesome coat, and 1 smooth beautiful highlight. The wash does half of the work for you, and if you want to leave it there you can. But just a little extra time can take it to the next level.
Variations
If you take this process and play with it a little, you can go a long way. A few variations:
- Skip the last highlight entirely. I almost did this on my Hive Guard gun it looked so good.
- Skip the wash and highlight by hand. The wash is a wicked easy thing, but it looks washed (duhh, because it is). If you do this highlighting by hand it’ll look way nicer (and people will be more impressed!). I did this with my Ork flesh – start really dark, then mix that dark colour with some black and a LOT of water (almost making your own wash, but not quite the same). Then start adding another lighter colour and highlight up. This is, as far as I know, what those really fancy amazing painters do. If you do this, you’ll want at least 1 base, 1 shadow, and then 2 highlight layers. But the more highlight layers you do, the more awesome it will look.
- Feathering. Similar in concept to a dry-brush, but where dry-brushing you tend to do a heavy coat, feathering you take the smallest amount of paint and just apply it in tiny little lines at the edge. This is an attempt at fooling the human eye into believing that the base and highlight colours are mixed, when they really aren’t. (no actual mixing occurs though – I tried wet on-model mixing once and it didn’t work out so good…yikes).
- You can take feathering even further. I really watered down the last layer and I’m apply it thicker at the tips and edges, and then drew lines outwards from there towards the base. You can see some what I’m talking about on almost any ‘Eavy Metal bone painting (The linked model cheats by having actual lines on the horns, where I’m painting those lines on) (Chakax will be featured here in a few months. He goes with the Temple Guard unit, but I’m not painting him with them for a few reasons).
(If you want more details, like exact colours and such, on these variations, just ask and I’ll write.)
Thanks for reading!