Chest of Colors forum

So, with a broken arm, I am missing painting, so I watched a DVD by Natalya Melnik - all 4 disks!!!

I have come to a realization about mini painting. My approach has been all wrong.

I have for the last 3 months been looking for techniques which achieve professional looking painting on minis.

After watching Natalya I figured out that I already know how to paint minis. I got caught up by fancy terms like Non-metallic metallics, darklining, glazes, edge highlighting, directional lighting, wet blending and I went in search of finding definitions and guides for those.

Natalya showed me with all her impressive technique that it all boils down to one thing.
Miniature PAINTING

Everything she did is what I would do when painting a canvas.

"Directional lighting" is something I have done since I was 8 years old

There is no trick to blending. You paint the mini as you would a flat canvas.

Non-metallic metallics is just ... painting metal. I have painted spoons, glass bottles, rusted tools, swords... for years.

What I think is specific to minis is the exaggeration of differences to create contrast and I think my paints are still too thick. I look for coverage, she painted masses of layers for everything which made blending a self-evident process.

I guess the good news for me is that I can apply my style to my mini painting, I will just have to learn how to create dramatic imagery on the smaller scale.

I think many of you have pushed at this with your comments, but watching someone paint a mini like its a canvas clarified a lot of what I was missing

Agreed, for the most part. I also have a fine arts background and came to a similar conclusion a while ago. The main problem is 'knowing' and 'doing' are two completely different things.

Painting theory gets skewed a bit when applied to miniatures because you're switching from a flat canvas to a three dimensional figure. In short; yes, it's the same conceptually, except you have to make it look appropriate from all angles. That's the real challenge.

I would never downplay the importance of practice and experience. My next attempt however will be painted very differently. Perhaps 20 minis down the line I will have a good idea of where I am going... finally. I put at least 5-6 hours in to every mini I touch, so I think I have the patience to get where I am going - then a 15 hour mini will look the part and my armies will show the time I put in to them as well.

every one of us has his/hers own distinctive style and approach. experiment, try different things, find something you enjoy and keep to it

My first attempt at model conversion - a Thunderwolf Cavalry. It is made from High Elf chariot lion, a goblin wolf rider wolf mount, a wolf guard torso, and a basic space marine chopped to pieces to make the legs. Then green stuff added for the fur, neck and to put the rider together

After is the initial idea for the paint job. No washes, blended base coat from chocolate brown to a 1:1 mix of chocolate brown:field drab with highlights of that same mixture mixed with vallejo light gray.

I used a new technique for me which was to water down the paint a lot - so the paint is very thin. I used no washes (or dry brushing), and started painting individual fur. I am thinking the next step on the wolf is to find a sand/light gray mixture to paint another round of fur strands to lighten the lower portion and scruff and tail - to better match natural colours. It should be a lighter colour since they are from fenris' freezing poles

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Necron - Imotekh

Instructions were: Paint a pre-built, pre-based Imotekh finecast miniature for a store so they could sell the opened product for about $50. This means the most I could get for the assignment is about $15-20

I capped the job at 4 hours.

Not only would I like some general comments, but I would love specific feedback on the staff. I knew what I wanted to do. I think I got the lighting going in the general right direction, but any execution recommendations for creating a smooth transition on such a small surface.

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Before I offer some ideas, I want to give you some food for thought. An ex-manager of mine always used to say to clients "you can have it done fast, you can have it done well or you can have it done cheaply - pick TWO". What I'm getting at is that you have (conciously or not) forced yourself into a compromise by saying "must sell for ~$50" and "only take 4 hours".

Apologies in advance if this sounds a bit harsh - I mean no offence by it.

The finish is very rough, it looks like the paint has not been thinned sufficiently and applied in smooth coats. The blending seems patchy and many sections of detail have been skipped.

I think you've tried to do too much and missed something critical. If I can draw your attention to the following Necrons on CMoN, they have a smoothness to the metallic paint that I think your mini could really benefit from.

https://www.coolminiornot.com/191959?browseid=1602057
https://www.coolminiornot.com/184709?browseid=1602057

I'd also suggest taking a look at Seb Archer's excellent metallics tutorial, which if memory serves is linked in the articles section of this forum.

You asked about blending - whilst I can't speak about wet blending (because I can't do it!) the method I use (layering) takes WAAAY too long to be practical on commercial terms like the ones you are presenting. Wet blending will be the way to go. If you need to get the speed up beyond that, maybe look at pre-shading using an airbrush (or even black/white primer cans) - take a look at the work of Thomas David or Jamie Downward to see what is possible using these methods (both paint to a very high standard in very short timeframes).

Hope this helps (and hope you don't hate me for it)!

I appreciate the feedback.

First off, I know this is very much a "bog standard" type approach to painting a miniature. I aimed for it to look nice on a table top, but certainly not something that could be entered in to a competition to win. Someone who wants an Imotekh for their army, painted relatively traditionally is supposed to be pretty happy with it overall.

I entered the process knowing the limitations,... clearly more time would have resulted in better outcome, but in some places, sadly, not by much - which is what I want the help on specifically lol.

To your feedback.

I am having trouble with the new GW paints. I tried thinning with both water and the lamian medium, and while the result was different both ways, neither was what I had hoped for.

The vallejo silver (the base coat) went on pretty smooth. I followed the GW painting guide for getting it to resemble the packaging, and so it was followed by a black wash, then with a bright silver, from the new line. It got clumpy and sticky on the brush and often on the model. Thinning it down further lead to it covering very badly and it started pooling in the recesses. So while I can't say that it was the paint's fault, I can tell you there is a fine line in there somewhere of perfect consistency and I clearly did not find it.

Similarly with the green - the lightest green was super watery in the pot, and as such I couldn't do much with it... the moot green (middle green) had that sticky consistency to it again. Vallejo, which is the dark green base, didn't have much of a problem.

Materials aside... practice is what is needed there to really get them to behave I feel, this is the 10th miniature I have painted after being out of the hobby for 15 years, so I continue to forge ahead in terms of trying new things to find what works best for me.

The cloak is a pretty short-handed layering technique where I made a mix of paints starting dark and going through to light and then layering it dark to light from recesses to ridges. Outside of the paint getting a little gloopy in places (I need to get better about controlling the amount of paint on the brush), it seemed to work okay but only on a broad surface like the cloak.

When I got to the staff I tried the same technique - deciding where and when to have to have light and shadow. Clearly I think the biggest error I made was allowing the paint to dry too much while working with it and it started to get a little dry-brushy. But if I went too much wetter, it just merged with the nearby colours and I ended up with a single colour again.

This stuff's tricky!

wow, voyager has written down my thoughts! I can sign under his post now

When I got to the staff I tried the same technique - deciding where and when to have to have light and shadow. Clearly I think the biggest error I made was allowing the paint to dry too much while working with it and it started to get a little dry-brushy. But if I went too much wetter, it just merged with the nearby colours and I ended up with a single colour again.

practice, practice, practice... you'll get it sooner or later

It got clumpy and sticky on the brush and often on the model

Assuming you're using the "layer" paints they have, and not the drybrush ones (Necron Compound is the one I'm thinking of specifically - it's meant for drybrushing only) this shouldn't be an issue. HOWEVER, I have heard from many people that they've had issues thinning those down with water alone (I've not experienced it personally) - their solution was to thin with Tamiya X20A acrylic thinner.

Can you tell us what ratio you are using of paint to water? That may help us provide more useful feedback. As an example, if I'm basecoating a figure, I'll use anywhere between 2:1 and 1:1 paint to water, depending on the amount of detail, the coverage of the colour I'm using, etc. When I'm doing shading & highlighting (remember I use the layering method) to my best standard I'm at about 1:4 paint to water - so 1 part paint to 4 parts water. For gaming figures it's more like 1:2 paint to water as I'm trying to paint a unit of 5-10 models in batch and can't justify spending 20+ hours per figure.

Finally, with metallic paints - it's been my experience that they don't thin down with water quite as well as normal acrylics. To combat this I use a mix of matte medium and water to thin down metallics. My normal mix for this is 2:1:1 - 2 parts paint, 1 part water, 1 part matte medium - and this gives me much more control over the metallic paint.