A Guide to fast painting

Becoming a good painter is not a matter of reading an article or finding the right newsgroup. It's a skill and as with every other skill it requires practice. Because while knowledge helps, practice makes perfect. In this article I'll describe the way I went along to get the style of painting I'm now at. And while doing this describe you some cheap tricks to get good results fast (as long as you don't look to close).

Remember when I first started I didn't have al the help you have now. All I had was a few mini's which I bought in a store that sold about 50 different mini's and gave no extra service on the subject. The only thing that explained the hobby a bit was the Games workshop painting guide. But since I didn't have any money at the time, buying it was out of the question.

So I brought home the miniatures and started to paint them. The only paint I had was a sort of oil paint from "Revell". Now this may be good for painting model airplanes and such, but my mini's came out looking like something the cat brought in (only less alive and squeaking). This was my first lesson. Use good paints. The best sort of paints for miniature gaming is Acrylic paints. The colors described on this page are from Games Workshop, but any acrylic paint will do.

So I went back to the store and got the paint. I am now at the stage at which all beginners are nowadays. You have some paints, but not all of them (Actually I still don't have all of them, because often you can't tell the difference between one color blue and another). So what do you do if you want a different color? Well mixing it of course.

At this point in time, I was mostly base-coating my mini's, then washing them and adding a drybrush or maybe two. To be honest, they still didn't look good. So what to do about this. Again practice and trying to find different styles to paint. Because at the time I did not have the money to buy the Games Workshop painting tutorial and Internet wasn't as advanced as it is now I had to find out every style of painting myself.

Because this did take very long, I will describe some of the things I've experimented with giving you the chance to learn them in a much shorter time period.

Weapons and armour:

I was painting an Orc army, so I didn't want or needed to paint the armor perfectly. Looking back now, the method Games Workshop and almost every other painter describes is: paint the surface in a metal color and add inks to make it look older. Since I did not have inks and had to make them myself, I tried a different method. I painted the surface black. And drybrushed the metallic color on. This perhaps takes a little extra time in the beginning, but eventually you'll save time.

Another way of painting:

Still painting my Orc army, I wanted the Orcs to be more dramatic and well, Orcy. So I experimented and at last came with this method.

Prime the model black. When painting on other colors leave a small part of the black paint showing in the corners and folds of the model. These include folds in clothing, the place where muscles meet each other, any detail on the Orcs faces and around the eyes. The actually does two things to the model: It gives the model a darker more realistic look and cleverly covers up any mistakes made when converting or modeling models. The down part is, it actually prevents the use of inks and washes on the area painted this way. (This is in fact very similar towhat some people call contouring or outlining)

Blending or drybrushing.

There is a method called blending, this is a method to fluidly have one color running into another by mixing paints from color A to color B. Because I did not know how this was done, I developed a quick method of doing this myself. This method gives a good result if working with good paints and larger surfaces, but on small surfaces like a Goblin's sword or teeth it tends to be less effective and actually quite messy.

This is what you do. Paint the area in the darker one of the colors. Then drybrush the lighter one on very gently. This takes at least 5 layers of drybrushing. Each layer should be focused more towards the end of the surface that will eventually be covered in the lighter color. Once the drybrushing is finished, you can repaint the light-colored end with the pure paint, filling in any of the dark color that's showing through.

Bright colors.

When applying bright colors over a dark surface, you should always apply white paint first, so the colors will be brighter. But you also want these bright colors to be shaded and highlighted. So do the following, instead of painting the white on, drybrush it on. This gives you automatic shading to your bright color.

Painting fur.

When painting a Wolf, Boar, Tusgor or a fur cape you usually prime the it, base-coat it and afterwards drybrush it a bit.

Want to do this faster? Well, just prime black and drybrush with a mid brown (e.g. bestial brown) then drybrush again with a much lighter brown (Bubonic Brown). And it's finished. Use varying shades of brown and heavier or lighter drybrushes for variation in brown.