I’ve been painting figures for many years now. I think I started doing 1/35 scale ww2 figures for dioramas back in about 1973. Whilst I’m always keen to try and learn new techniques, I have a method… well…. a bunch of techniques… which works pretty well. Some are best for big or small scales, but maybe you also paint a range of size figures.
There probably isn’t an ideal method for any given person, there are many will work. I try out different methods all the time. Every once in a while I ditch something I’ve been doing for years because I find something else suits me better or works faster.
I recommend you keep an open mind and try everything.
Most of the time I aim to get something looks fair to good on the table. Excellent quality takes time and I’m happy to compromise on quality in order to get a quicker result. My eyesight isn’t what it used to be and it’s not until I look at something magnified I can tell the difference anyhow.
But maybe you’re still young, enthusiastic and have
I strongly recommend you just kick back and relax.
Say you paint something really INCREDIBLY well. Let’s assume you’re not a pro painter, you’re just doing it for yourself and maybe a friend or two.
You take your BRILLIANT figure down the club and whip it out with a flourish. For maybe 30 seconds the crowd gathers and tells you how nice it looks. They then shuffle off to play their
Call me cynical, but I reckon 30 seconds praise for 8 hours painting is a poor return.
Spend half an hour on a figure and produce something looks pretty good and you may well get slightly less praise, but you still have a life.
What’s that? No life? OK OK…. You got 15 more figures painted then. :^)
If you agree your time is valuable, but you also want people to think your miniatures look pretty good then you’ll be glad to hear there are some shortcuts and tricks you can use.
I arrived at most of my approach years back whilst working part time as a pro figure painter. Customers paid and came back for more, so I must have got something right.
These may overlap what follows, but I reckon the following points are important.
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Neatness |
Not only in terms of painting within the lines, but also in terms of overall look. Overall look is what the customer / viewer first notices actually. First impressions are the most important. |
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Planning |
Think what order to paint in, think about the techniques will best suit your subjects. This saves you time and you need less skill. |
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Avoid fussiness |
Fantasy figures, especially, have a lot of widgets and fiddly bits, don’t paint these in different colours. It’ll look a mess at a distance even if it looks cool up close.. |
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Understand paints |
Cheap paints are fine for many purposes but will let you down on others. |
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Understand colours |
Study colour theory and find something explains the colour wheel. Buy something by Shep Payne. |
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Groundwork |
People mostly see your figures on a table from above. The groundwork on the base will be particularly noticeable |
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Lighting |
You want natural colour light one way or another, blue bulbs, natural light colour fluorescent tubes, North facing window or an Actulite if you have money to burn. |
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Posture |
Wreck your back and you’ll be going nowhere. Lean your elbows on foam laid on a table. Your elbows should be at shoulder width and the figure will be up by your mush without you leaning over. |
Preparation prevents piss poor performance.
Scrape and file all the flash off. I prefer scraping and a scalpel. If you can manage to do this without the occasional tiny cut, then I am jealous.
Sometimes you find there’s a bitch of a flash mark you can’t get out, or you notice it too late and can’t be bothered scraping undercoat. What I do is fill over it with white liquid paper. This dries workable and takes paint well plus will fill small imperfections without undue mess.
But before you do this filling in you want to make sure the surfaces will take paint. Soak plastics in warm water and detergent to remove the mould release stuff. Key metal figures and clean off everything by dipping in warm water + detergent and scrubbing with a cheap wire brush. They’ll resist chipping that bit better.
I used to use enamels. This was back when acrylics were very new and I was too impatient for oils. Since I was a kid I had little alternative but to paint in my bedroom. After a few years of this I acquired an allergy to the mineral spirits thinner.
I moved on from enamels to acrylics, there are a few downsides but they are arguably out-weighed by the positives and headaches and a constant cold were deciding factors for me….
Since then the years have ticked by and my allergy has let up somewhat so the exceptions to this are for undercoat and varnish.
You young uns are probably wondering why the hell anyone’d ever use enamels anyhow.
There’s no surface tension problems to worry about, they go on really smooth and you can blend them well. This last is especially true if you do the model-painters trick of mixing oils and enamels. Yep, you can do that.
Oils are another bunch of paints are currently much under-rated. They go on SO smoothly. You can blend and blend and blend and keep on blending. There are two downsides: Turps and drying time. Even if you sit the things on a radiator shelf, a thin coat of oil paint will take a day to dry. One way around this is alkyds. Another is to have 4 batches of figures to paint at any one time and stick one away and work on another batch after each colour.
A stint painting with oils REALLY forces you to think ahead. So long as you can borrow the paints or the money doesn’t matter, then I heartily recommend it as an experience.
For a while I liked to use sprays and Halfords acrylic car undercoat was my preference. Did I mention I was asthmatic? No? Well sprays and asthma are not good so there was something of a ceremony involved in undercoating a batch of figures.
First, I’d check the weather. Weather is bad. Any wind or rain anyhow and you either need a spray booth in your garage + a TOP OF THE RANGE respirator or you can forget it.
Next, the spray would be immersed in a basin of hot water to heat up and make sure it sprayed well. Whilst this was warming, I’d set up the batch of figures on my 3 ply work-board. I have a bunch of these. You want a number for that inevitable period where you can’t face painting another Orc/SS/Boer and you want to do something else. Where was I, yep, out into the real world.
Out into the elements to the garage and set my workmate up in the centre of the back garden.
On with the gas mask. You think I’m kidding? No way am I breathing paint aerosol. Not with my lungs matey.
Lob a big cardboard box on top of the workmate and the work-board inside for an instant spray booth.
If instant is an appropriate word in this context.
Anyhow, one spray is not enough so you need a thin coat, wait an hour, another coat.
At least 24 hours later the bits of the figure missed would have to be hand-undercoated.
One day I was sitting there doing this and the proverbial light bulb went on over my balding head.
I figure if you’re going to have to get the damn brush out to undercoat by hand, then you may as well lob a coat on manually.
So I now use the kind of primer intended for garage doors. Non-ferrous metal primer. 3 pounds something-or-other for a huge can which’ll dry up way before you run out. One coat of this stuff is fine. It’s a warm creamy colour which I now realize some of my former customers used to prep their figures with. Don’t be fooled by the description. This stuff will stick great on rigid plastics.
Bendy plastics are an altogether different proposition. First you need a couple of coats of thinned PVA then you need to paint on acrylic primer. To cut down work I mix black miniature paints undercoat and artists’ tube acrylic umber. If you don’t know what colours are without a “dark-angel” or a “gore” in it, get yourself straight down an art shop. Umber is a dark brown and it’s a proper name for a colour, not made up by some dip-stick as a way-kewl marketing name for kids.
You kids today. Don’t know you’re born. When I was a lad we lived in a hole in the road and…
We’re wargamers, so we don’t just want one figure at a time. We want a big bunch and he more the better. Break a genre down into a series of batches of similar figures. There’s a balance to be struck in exactly how big a batch should be. Too small and you miss out on the economies of scale. Too big and you will take longer to finish – before you get the morale boosting “FINISHED!”.
Anyhow, stick your batch of figures in an A4 box file, top off a box of copier paper, orange box or a piece of 3 ply.
Paint a colour at a time on all ( or all will have that colour ) so you only have to mix it the once.
Shove your batch over so there’s some space in one corner of your box and pick the nearest up, paint, put it down into the corner and do the next… Progress across the box with that space between your done and to-do figures.
If you’re a bit clumsy, be careful to pick your figures up with your off-hand so you don’t dob paint on the figures behind one as you pick it up.
Wassat?
You already done it?
Stick the figure straight in your water pot. Don’t hang about. Wash the paint off.
I used to prefer artificial bristles. Then I tried high quality sable. Now I use size 1 artificial bits for some twiddly bits bit the rest of the time I use natural bristle.
Did you know that there is no particular standard for brush sizes? That’s right. A humbrol size 1 can be a completely different size from anyone else’s size 1.
I like the brushes historex agents stock and they’re not ridiculously expensive. I recommend a size 1 and 2.
When I’m painting 28mils, particularly, I tend to use big humbrol brushes.
These have no point on them whatsoever, but this doesn’t often matter
until I do final detailing. When I want
a thin brush I draw my huge thick one across the pallet and it forms a
chisel-point. I then use one of the thin
ends.
The best way to fix em is not to
stuff the thing up in the first place.
Make sure you dampen a brush before you load it with paint, mix paint
with a cocktail stick and,,, Oh why am I wasting my time telling you all
this. You already stuffed the thing and that’s
why you’re reading this.
If you have a ragged brush and want to try fixing it then try this.
Wet the bristles in a mix of water and a little fabric conditioner. Draw the brush across a flat smooth surface or through the crease in the palm of your other hand and twirl it slightly as you do so. If the thing still looks like a Christmas tree the following july then you’re probably best off tossing it. Otherwise you want some newspaper or brown paper and sellotape. Tear a 4 inch strip or so of paper and get a bit of sellotape ready and stuck on the back of your off hand. Make sure there’s that point on your brush and wrap the paper around bristles and ferrule. Once you have a sort of tube thing tight around the ferrule and bristles you put your sellotape around to hold it. You’re going to want to take the damn thing off later, so fold the very end of the sellotape over on itself so’s you have something to grab. What, you already put the sellotape on? Too bad. Now you’re going to shag it up taking the thing off. Ah well.
Put your wrapped brush somewhere and leave it until at least 24 hours have gone by.
Once it’s definitely dry you can unwrap it and survey your handiwork. Sometimes it’ll work.
Acrylics are swimming about in water. They’re not actually water soluble, more of a suspension. Don’t be one of them stupid gits thinks the paint will come off in water once it’s dry. Think plastic.
If that plastic dries on your brush it’s a bitch to get out. You can tease it out with fingernails and you can wash your brush with special artist’s soap but I’d rather not be in the position of having to. Once one of my “expensive” brushes is getting a bit ragged, I toss it and get out another one. This happens every 6 months or so and as I spend a lot of time painting I figure I’ve had my worth out of one.
If 6 months sounds like it’s much longer than you get out a brush then the chances are you aren’t washing them properly or you’re treating em bad.
You want a big container full of water to wash your brush frequently. I use an old pickle jar but there’s an argument for an even bigger one like a carafe. If you’re about to go off and use a carafe then don’t you dare tell your parents I told you to. And don’t even think of knocking it over.
Even a big jar of water will get dirty pretty quick and you should change it. If you paint with metallics, you’ll want to change it before using any other colours.
After each painting session take the time to wash your brush out under warm running water. Not hot. If it’s at all hot you’ll rag the bristles as it’ll take out their natural oils and the stuff glue sticks em in the ferrule may well loosen and… well... you get the picture. Just don’t go there.
Every once in a while whiz your brush in a little fabric conditioner if you don’t use that fancy brush soap.
Make sure the brush stands business end up when not in use.
You need dark bits in the sticky-in parts.
Miniatures are small, creases and stuff in the clothes are comparatively small and will thus not crate much shadow on the figure. Unless you paint in the low-lights on a figure darker then they won’t stand out as much as they would on someone you saw far away enough the figure looks the same size… which is what you’re representing.
The bits of you sticking out the most and the parts nearest light will tend to catch the light. They will look lighter and whiter/greyer than the rest of you. Highlighting is thus sort of the reverse of shading and attempts to replicate this effect.
The smaller the figure, the more contrast you need. The larger the figure the more it’ll create the effects itself and hence the more subtle you can be. There is a complication ought to be mentioned here though. People will expect shading. Tell them what you like, if you paint a big figure with less shading, some people will not like it. Excessive shading and highlighting is thus common and fashionable. Coco Chanel forgive me, excessive shading is the new black.
(That’s a sort of fashion joke guys ).
So you want dark bits and light bits. Acrylic paints are mostly translucent. That means if you paint a colour onto black it’ll look dull and if you paint onto white it’ll look brighter.
This is why I don’t like the black undercoat technique.
I stain the figure up with a mix of umber and black. Black will appear too stark and has a tendency to make the figure look dirty. A proviso here is the small scale figures. Arguably with 10mil and definitely on 6mil black is the way to go because you need more contrast and black is darker.
So you got a featureless dark brown blob.
Then damp brush over this white.
This defines all the high-spots on your figure sort of automatically, but you should look at it as you go and apply stringer white to the top bits which would usually catch more light.
Be prepared to fix any bits of flash etc that you previously missed.
You should end up with a sort of sepia effect with the contrast between lo- and hi- lights particularly strong.
Paint the colour is in the inner most parts of the figures first, so you minimize reaching past the parts you already painted whilst you paint colours afterwards. Usually this will mean flesh first.
Painting your main colour into an area ( like a painting-by-numbers kit without the numbers ) if referred to as blocking in. Almost everyone agrees you should thin your paints for this process. I like to thin to a bit thicker than a stain. Like a thin skimmed milk.
As with everything else in painting, you’ll want to experiment with this.
Once you’ve done this the main colour is on and the top bits should be brighter than the dark lo-lights. Until you do the whole figure it’ll still not look so good so just concentrate on being neat and not getting the wrong colour on anwhere.
After you got the hang of this, try not blocking in onto the very edges of each area, ie let the umber-black mix show straight through.
See if you like the effect.
On stuff like 20mil infantry they may have badges and things are dead fiddly to paint and can easily go wrong. If you try and do these absolutely representative of the originals then you will risk going barking mad. What is more, on the table people cannot see all that detail so although you’ll know it’s there, nobody else will.
I find a rough representation is good.
If you paint these on as the first step after pre-shading then you can fix mistakes BEFORE you put your main colour on.
Let’s consider those screaming eagles somewhere out there on the web site…
On the left upper arm paras had a “screaming eagle” patch and on the right a stars and stripes.
Stars and stripes on a 20mil figure? Roughly, yep.
Umber blob on the upper left arm and a white rectangle on the right are the starting points.
With a fine brush, put a faint diagonal white blob across on the brown blob and draw it off lightly to the left. This will suggest to the eye that something is going on there and is enough. Forget yellow beak or absolute shape, that’s as close as I could be bothered with for a puking chicken.
Stars and stripes next…. stripes. You want a fine brush and a cocktail stick. Lightly load the brush with red and draw it across your pallet to make sure it’s going to go on smooth. Twirl the brush so it’s as pointy as you’re going to get. Pull it all the way across your white rectangles fairly quick. Don’t worry too much if a few of the lines run into one another but try and get them close. Scratch lightly across any of them have run into one another with the cocktail stick.
Next step is a mid blue square, actually you need only really be careful that the inner part is square.
You’ll be doing each step of this to all your batch at a time of course.
Once you’ve done the last one, load up a bigger brush with white and go back through them painting straight edges around any of your rectangles have any red or blue straying a bit too obviously.
Then continue blocking in with your uniform colour – obviously not over your badges.
This is a technique using paint thinned somewhat more than usual. The translucent nature of the paint is thus emphasized and what’s underneath will show through more. With some care you can put a stain over a radically different coloured area and get interesting effects. The effect is somewhere between just blocking a colour in and applying a wash.
The attraction is the translucency combined with the extra bit of shading/highlighting you get as the paint comes off the top bits and pools in lower areas.
Staining is the technique I use to slap the main colours on over the pre-shade.
Used to apply top high-lights to an area. Any imperfections will be brought out along with surface detail. This unfortunately applies to imperfections in your previous coats of paints such as any little bobbles have dried unevenly. This can produce rather a harsh “chalky” look to a figure if you’re not careful and people often then apply a filter or glaze over the top to reduce this. Since it takes some time to get right, I don’t use this technique as much as many others. I prefer faster techniques such as damp brushing.
Dampen your brush, remove most of the moisture. Dip the very tip in a little colour on your pallet. Rub first across your pallet and then across some tissue a few times until there is very little paint left. You need to wash the brush out and redo this loading process frequently or the paint will dry on the brush and you’ll need to toss the thing.
Don’t use a good brush because after you finish doing this the first time, it won’t be good.
I like the cheap Humbrol brushes you get from the beatties-replacement chain for this. 30 to 60 pence a brush is MY sort of price.
You’ll likely have heard of dry brushing. Damp brushing is similar but with a heavier load of paint on. The original paint should be thinned slightly and loaded onto a damp brush. Draw off most of the colour onto a pallet until it smears rather than paints. Apply lightly.
Once it’s dry you can apply some more for a layering effect.
Pretty much as it implies, layering refers to putting on
multiple layers of paint with the point being that you get less translucent and
more solid effect where you got more paint.
I use this in combination with filter/glaze/damp brush so you get more lighter colour on the top
hi-lights.
This is pretty much a stain really, although it’s a term applied to highlighting. Say you want a bright yellow finish. You lay down your orange-yellow into the lo-lights, mid yellow into the rest and they you highlight lemon. Maybe it doesn’t look bright enough? Apply a white damp brush onto the highlights. Then stain over this and the bits just around them with lemon. The white will make it stand out more.
You can also use this with inks and mixing inks and acrylics over.
The idea here is to emphasise the
different bits of colour you lay down and or to
neaten up the edges if you stuffed up.
Whilst also deepening lo-lights.
If you use black undercoating you can leave a little around the edges of each area as you block it in and leave a black line. You can also take a fine brush and draw a black line around everything. A mapping pen or a 0.1 edding felt tipped mapping pen are also possible. The mapping pen’s attraction is that you can get very fine lines. The disadvantage is that you need very steady hands or you will end up with wobbly lines. It will also not cover up mistakes if you use a very fine line.
My preference is something more subtle.
I mix umber and liquitex payne’s grey with water and johnson’s kleer ( acrylic floor varnish ). This will then go on as a filter and has built in surface tension reduction so it’ll go into crevices particularly well. I paint this around webbing etc. using a fine good quality brush. As you mix this on your palette, leave a little payne’s grey to one side. Paint this around cuffs and under edges of helmets etc where you need a deep shadow.
The best colour to use varies depending on underlying colour. Yellow is particularly tricky (raw sienna). For Flesh you want a warmer colour with burnt umber and just a little payne’s grey.
People paint their figures black and then block in straight over them. They then complain that their colours don’t cover well enough and they need loads of layers to get a good red. Acrylics are translucent. That means you want white on the highlights or you have a load of extra work to do.
You dip the figure in varnish and colour and then have to shake and wick all the stuff off or it’ll look like crap.
Tried it.
Don’t like the effect.
The idea here is to make the paint do the work to get into all those little nooks and crannies. Thus you are applying something darker over a lighter colour. People often use this to apply a black-lining sort of effect.
Use good quality paint such as liquitex, thin right down (with boiled water if you have hard water in your area). If you just slosh this on straight you’ll get a sort of tidemark effect. This is due to surface tension from the water. You need something to reduce this such as a surfactant like a teeny bit of detergent or some isopropyl alcohol like in car screen wash. Or you can add a little johnson’s kleer acrylic floor varnish. Oddly enough, ink makers came across this problem and solved it years back. Winsor Newton water soluble ink is something else is good to stick in washes.
I know people who block all colours in over a white undercoat, gloss varnish and then apply a Winsor Newton “nut brown” wash over the entire figure before sealing with matte varnish.
There are probably many things more soul destroying than wrecking a paint job with a bad varnishing over it. When you find yourself in this position then you will probably forget all those worse things though.
My current thinking is to first gloss varnish with 2 coats of Humbrol model cote. Once this is completely dry ( it can take days ) then a very thin coat of Winsor & Newton acrylic matte varnish over the matte bits. All matte acrylic varnishes are not equal and this stuff is the best I’ve tried. Mix it well, thin a little and load your brush very lightly. You want a very thin coat as this stuff is very matte an your figures will look dusty if you’re not careful.