Painting minis; getting started

MGibster said:

And here is my completed Inner Sphere Striker Lance. It's been a long time since I've painted BattleTech models, and I'm not sure I like painting at this scale (10mm) as much as I enjoy larger scales. At this scale, I just have to accept that I won't be able to add the details I like adding at larger scales because you're simply not going to be able to see them.
View attachment 260794
And on another note, let's talk aesthetics for a moment. While I don't want to describe BattleTech as being "realistic," because it's got battle mechs walking around, I would have to say that the design aesthetic is convincingly realistic when it comes to looking like a military vehicle. They're not really designed to look cool so much as they're designed to look functional (though some of them do look cool). So the paint jobs I find most flattering are those that are more on the realism side of camouflage or at least muted colors like green, tan, browns, etc., etc. Aside form not being a great paint job, the Black Jack below in the darker blues just looks ridiculous. (The Pink Panther gets a pass because it's supposed to look ridiculous.) But you don't improve your skills without going outside your comfort zone, and painting in a different scale is certainly a new experience.

Click to expand...

Yeah I am having the same issue, my eyes are too bad to get to the level of detail id like.

I also painted the striker lance recently. Here is my scheme. Still thinking on canopy and other fine details.

Yeah, after a certain point, there's just no way you can paint little details on stuff so that human eyes can still see it.
The smaller you get, the harder it becomes to paint individual details (or even the suggestion of details like rust, battle damage or mud) so they'll still show up to the human eye.

MGibster said:

As you progress, you eventually end up having to layer paint to get it to do what you want and that's especially true for flesh. For this giant, I applied a fairly dark flesh tone and followed that up with multiple layers of ever lighter flesh tones. If you lok closely at the face, you'll see that he's got a red blush around his nose and his cheeks.

Click to expand...

Yeah, minis are small enough that they don't really cast their own shadows or show their own highlights very well, so if you want them to be visible you have to paint them on by hand.
If you look at a digital illustration blown up enough to see the individual pixels, you'll notice that something "green" is actually drawn with about seven or eight colors going all the way from black in the shadows to yellow or white on the highlights. It's the contrast between those various colors that makes the human eye read them as being three-dimensional and blended together as various shades of green.
For minis, painting something "green" means you end up having a base color, a shadow color and a highlight color - three separate shades of green. Or more. Or other colors, depending on how much time you want to invest in the figure - if you're assembly-lining twenty orcs for your tabletop game most folks are just going to dip them in a thinned-out wash of black or brown, which will naturally pool up in the recesses of the figure as it dries, adding in the shadows...

On MGibster's giant, for the flesh you can see he's gone from a reddish dark tan in the shadows up to a yellowish white on the forehead highlights. This orc I painted with green skin (linked for nudity) has a few more muscles to it, so you can see pretty clearly that although the base color of the flesh was forest green, the shadows go all the way to black in some spots and the highest highlights are a light mint green. She's got, hrm, I think three layers of highlights and shadows on her.

I need to do some touch up, but this is gonna be the final look of him. I was thinking if I paint the other minotaurs, I'll paint the loincloth a different color to give them easily identifiable markings.
"I attack the orange one"
"The green one makes his save. "

I always said I'll never win any contests, but my Imperial Knight army was voted best painted in our last Warhammer 40k league. Hurrah!

Fire giant I painted a few days ago.



Now these guys I spent a lot of time on.


For a "quick" paintjob, after priming, I fully paint in the base colours, then cover those areas in washes. Some areas I will repaint in the original colours, leaving the recesses in the darkened colours. After doing so, I add in highlights on edges, raised areas and places where the light might hit, such as the upper portion of a chest.

Andvari said:

For a "quick" paintjob, after priming, I fully paint in the base colours, then cover those areas in washes. Some areas I will repaint in the original colours, leaving the recesses in the darkened colours.

Click to expand...

My Space Hulk Terminators are still half done after a number of years. Yours look nice.

Do you need a wash labeled paint to do a wash? I've seen the word used and I've seen paints. I don't know much about it.

You can just thin regular paints to use as washes. That being said, I have never really done that (like maybe once or twice ever) and usually just buy washes.

Then there's inks, which are different. IIRC the coloured particulate is much finer, giving you a different (smoother?) effect.

Nowadays there's other types of paints too. About which I know basically nothing. So over to more knowledgeable painters...

A wash is just a technique using watered-down paint so that it mostly flows into the recessed areas - it's a quick method of shading.
Using a black or brown wash (one or two drops of paint to five-ten drops of water) is a much quicker way to add in your shadows than painting them. Because you watered down the paint, it'll be translucent, and the underlying color will show through, but because it will also pool up into the recesses of the figure as it dries, those areas will end up being tinted the color of the wash. If you look at the linked pic of the orc I painted, you can see what a wash looks like on the wood on the inside of her shield - the dark wash pooled up a little bit in the wood grain, but mostly in the spaces between the boards. It's essentially the same thing as when you shave in the bathroom sink, then let the water drain out slowly - as the water leaves, it leaves behind particulate matter i.e., the leftover shaving cream... In the sink, whatever leftover shaving cream didn't get left on the sides of the sink will pool up near the drain, and on a wash, the color is darker in the lower parts that were the last to dry and most of the pigment ended up.
You can also use the same principle for a technique called glazing where instead of just applying it to areas you want to shade, you paint over the the whole area to give a nice even tint to the entire thing.

There are a number of wash recipes readily available online, but many companies sell their own pre-made washes.
Inks perform a similar function to a wash, although generally they tend to end up a bit shinier when dry.

Games Workshop (Warhammer)'s Agrax Earthshade and Nuln Oil are very popular brown and black washes, respectively, and even people who don't use GW paints often use them.

Mad_Jack said:

Games Workshop (Warhammer)'s Agrax Earthshade and Nuln Oil are very popular brown and black washes, respectively, and even people who don't use GW paints often use them.

Click to expand...

I'm slowly moving away from GW paints as a whole, but I'll probably be using their washes forever. Well, maybe. They changed the recipe lately and I haven't given it a try yet.

@Aeson, a common technique with a wash is to apply it over the entire miniature (or just part), remove as much as you can from the raised or flat areas, and once it dries come back and apply your base color to the raised/flat areas. It makes your minature look a bit more 3 dimensional.