These are much thicker, gloopier liquids to work with. Be careful to not lose control with them as they can quickly overrun a model. Be sure to let your shades dry entirely before painting over them. If you disturb a Shade finish before it has dried, you will reveal the paint below in a concentrated area, and suddenly, in one infuriating instant, the illusion of beautifully painted metal, wood, or cloth is ruined. Layering is when we take that base coated, shaded plastic and add mid-tones over the top of it, to create even more depth.
The layering on creatures like this has to be more subtle than the glint of light off the edge of a spear. There are obviously degrees of this, but you can see on the legs and neck areas how each horse has been base coated with a darker mid-tone, shaded to get all that lovely dark detail into the recesses of its flesh, and then layered back up with brighter and brighter colours in smaller and smaller areas until you have a nice range of tones throughout the whole model.
Also: never be afraid to start again, if you need to, by painting your base colour back over and starting again. Edge highlighting is the sharp-edge layering I was talking about earlier.
It is a perfect way of imparting an immense boost of depth and vibrancy to something like the power armour of an Astartes soldier, or adding reflective depth to metallic surfaces.
Their many-edged power armour suits offer the best all-round introduction to this technique. Essentially, you are adding brighter paint to points on the model that would most reflect light. It allows your eyes to best parse the various definitions.
In the most time-consuming but most effective form of this technique, you want to do this in multiple stages, going from a chunkier highlight using a shade or two above your base coat, all the way to really thin, really bright extreme highlight colours for the very sharpest of edges. This aforementioned Lieutenant has been painted with an Abaddon Black base coat, highlighted with a chunky edge of Incubi Darkness, followed by a thinner highlight of Dark Reaper, followed by an even thinner highlight of Thunderhawk Blue.
The best way to achieve the effect is with a sharp, fine-tipped brush. Your paint needs to be thinned down from pot-consistency, but not runny. And you should use the side, not the tip, of your brush to catch only the most raised edges of the model, where you can. You can, if you prefer, do a simpler highlight with two, or even one highlight.. The effect is still impressive, as seen on the unfinished Black Templar trooper at the top of this section.
This is a one or two stage highlight with brighter colours, and you can see a similar effect on the red of his unfinished gun. Drybrushing looks easy, but it can be really tough to get right in certain scenarios.
The technique is very simple. Tabletop galaxies: These are the best Star Wars board games. The best way is to try it on the back of your hand first. Drybrushing is perfect for items like metal guns, the entire of Necron armies, and also for cloth — I much prefer the look of drybrushed cloaks, for example, to that of fine detail brush highlighting, as it adds more texture. The same goes for feathers; this Lumineth Realm-lord sculpt was blended using an airbrush, but the drybrushing technique has brought everything together to make it look like a cohesive entity.
The toughest and most advanced iteration of layering is blending — achieving perfect transitions between colours on a totally flat surface to create the illusion of intense shadowing and colour shift. In Warhammer 40K, this is most often seen with power swords, shown below. Thin your paint down on the palette, and make sure you get almost all of it off the brush, so none of it pools in unwanted areas when you put paint to plastic. You work these layers up, gradually, letting each super-thin coat dry before applying the next.
Finish it off with an extreme edge highlight to really make it pop. The overall point with any detailing is to keep taking your time. But remember: thin paint in small areas is easy to fix, relatively speaking, so taking care still pays. The key detail lots of people want to get right is faces.
And with good reason: a face is a focal point on a model, and is something the eye is immediately drawn to. Use paint sparingly, often slightly dabbing with your brush tip, rather than brushing the paint on in strokes. You can apply multiple different skin tones for the gradients if you want to. Lastly, with the eyes, you want a single tab of white paint in the recessed eye hole.
Try and keep an outline of shade around the edges. This can then be pointed with a tiny amount of black paint for a striking stare. I was painting this up as part of another blog tutorial and it came out very poorly. To top it off, I dropped him.
I struggled to get the flesh layers down and then went far too heavy on the wash. Again with the blue in the middle of the image, Time to check my camera lens. As you can see here, my scrubbing caused his head to fall off. There is still some cleanup to do again but I can get this easily with another pass of soaking and scrubbing. Finally the after shot.
This was with pipe cleaners again and you can see that this looks almost new. I stuck his head back on with blu-tack just for the photo can you spot it?
There have been a few comments and questions about resin. When writing this post I took a spare resin part I had, just to test it. I have previously stripped Njall Stormcaller with only a minimum amount of detail lost on the pointiest edges.
Most of the hair points have been brushed off, the tip of the hair has completely snapped off and the teeth of the skull have also lost their points. On the rear, you can pretty much see the same, app the points and tips have come away. The hair strands have lost their detail, most noticeable toward the bottom left corner.
This crease was permanent. The resin came out really soft, and the brushing took the highest points of detail away. IPA, like most paint strippers, will make the resin a bit softer. IPA is a fantastic cleaner, from Brushes to benches it gets everything back to squeaky clean. With the added benefit of disinfecting whatever it touches. Now, I'm not saying MyFirstWarhammer was my idea but…………….. You can say it if you want.
What did you think of this Tutorial? Click the share links at the bottom of this screen or on the left for computers and tablets. Want to keep updated with the blog? You can subscribe in the sidebar for RSS or by email below. Email address:. Self-appointed Editor in chief of FauxHammer. View all posts. Thanks for your in depth and comprehensive tutorial! It has clarified and improved my knowledge to cleaning miniatures with isopropyl alcohol.
I have reused the isopropyl to the point that it has gone black and some miniatures have a slight dark residue too them. Do you know if its safe to paint over this residue? Also, when do you decide to dispose the isopropyl alcohol before using a new batch for painting? Would it work? Thanks for the article. I have tried some other methods if stripping and have found that fine detail or sharp edges can be smoothed over by the solvent cleaners.
Does the ipa do this to any extent? Also there is no benefit to using a dust mask, the ipa fumes are in the gas phase and will pass through.
You would need something with an adsorbant medium in that takes out vocs. But really ventilation will do the trick anyway. Skin contact would be ok if not prolonged as they use it in hand wash gel, albeit not as concentrated.
If you follow the guide and leave them in for a limited time I have found that there is no impact at all on details. Thanks for the shout out about the Face Mask. I had this comment preciously and added this mask as an alternative from the previous one I recommended. Hi, great information here, Have broughtnsom3nisontontry out have been using acer one for stripping metal models as it seems to work amazingly well, knlt have to put models in for 2 — 3 mins and give them a scrub and they come up really good.
Looking forwards to seeing what results I get on the plastic with the iso. Thanks for that. I have old metal figurines from the early 80s which i painted badly.
I can now strip them and try again. Oven pride is really, really expensive compared to IPA dude! You can. But be careful. It helps to loosen some of the paint but leave it in too long and it will eat into the surface of the plastic. Only if it is an explosion proof ultrasonic cleaner, which costs a fortune.
It might not happen the first time, but it will eventually. But if you do it anyway, be sure to get it on video. Wow, thanks so much. I put a lot of effort into these to try and make them the best they can be and I regularly update them.
I rarely have to use it more than once or twice. Ok Mat the reason your figures are comin out a bit dark is simply the old paint which is in your ISO, simple solution is to filter your iso after each session. Coffee filters will act as a suitable filter paper. The writer of the article [ointed out that they are not a chmist, my background however is lab monkey. Ok, yes heavy duty cleaners may clean your figures, but, they will almost certainly leave a residue on your figures that will be almost impossible to paint over.
ISO is what we use in labs to give a final clean to glassware. Plastic figures you need to keep a good eye on because ISO can dissolve plastics. Great article. Thank you very much for sharing. This is a very thorough and comprehensive guide. I was trying to figure out why I was seeing prices around 10 times higher than you talked about for isopropyl.
Then I realised that they put the stuff in hand sanitiser. If this the case on a painting commission, we spray that color over the whole army. Not with an airbrush - with a spraygun. The kind you use to paint cars. We go through a garage-grade air compressor once every five years or so.
Wherever possible, if we can use a machine to make our lives easier, we do. Further, nothing saves time like not wasting time. We save time on management by using shared Google documents for our dashboards. Anything a client asks for gets written down. This is also why we confuse you writing from a single email address. It creates a single archive that we can refer. Knowledge management saves time. Specialists can optimize, and this frees up painters to sit and paint.
Building minis? Priming minis? Packing minis? The Ten Thousand Hour rule is real. This I have problems with. The catch though is that the skill base erodes because painters get less practice and what they specifically should be practicing. Our whole shtick is treating miniature painting like a consistent manufacturing process.
The reality however is that the biggest multiplier is the painter themselves. Are they happy? Did they just fall in love?
He just prefers them because he likes the characters and their stories. The fastest painters are always the most inspired — and there is no corresponding increase in error rate. Our most inspired painters have the least errors. All-Stars are as real in painting as they are in sports. They will always pull of something insane. Doing miniature painting for Kickstarter board games keep us on our toes. You see different designs and styles from the usual.
Often, the figures are as good as the ones the big-name brands produce. We painted quite a large number of figures recently for a game named AltarQuest. This blog is about our miniature painting service. Here is what we painted. These were all painted to our Standard Quality.
Recently, we finished a fair-sized Lumineth Realm Lords miniature painting commission. GW goes to town on all its armies now. However, there is usually a gradient in terms of the work involved. Troops and lower-level figures requiring less, HQs and named characters needing more. This is not how they approached the Lumineth. From the Wardens upwards, each mini needs a fair bit of attention. I suspect this is because GW wanted this army to keep the more advanced painters happy.
It gives us a lot to work with. The drawback though, is that it drives the price up. It is not the most affordable option when it comes to commissioning professional miniature painters. He also did some cultist conversions using Bloodreavers:. This was a straightforward miniature painting service commission. The client gave us a clear art brief and Chaos Space Marines feel like every other figure in the studio these days. Where we ran into problems though were the rhinos - they arrived without their tracks.
We approach it like science. Here was one of those weird problems. The client has ordered some custom tracks to give his rhinos more oomph, but the seller never shipped them. So, rather than hold up the whole army waiting for tracks, we found some designs on Thingiverse and printed them.
Cost to client? This was a win for everyone. We got to do quite a large Beastmen army. The challenge with Beastmen is all the muscles - they need to be consistent. We often split armies between painters to help guarantee completion dates, but here we just kept it with two.
Even then, at the end they needed to reconcile some differences that crept in. It was a fun miniature painting commission all the same. In terms of colors, the green and brown offset each other. All the banners have freehand painted designs. It is hard to forecast: we once billed for 5 hours of freehand that ended up being 2 weeks of full-time work that sucked, but it was our fault. The more intricate the design, the more doubtful it is that we can match it. We had to cowboy up and get it done.
We discussed it with the client and he was good with what we could offer. He paid us well for the time, and we went for a clean, uniform, disciplined look. Sign In My Account. Gallery: See our Painting.
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