Painting tips

Recently, I’ve found myself enjoying painting a lot more that I have done in a while. The reason, less boring troops to paint! For 40K and Warhammer, much of the units are large and similar, leading me to boredom very quickly. Warmachine and Hordes have much smaller units that are much more interesting to paint. Thus my joy of painting has been rekindled.

So, I’ve been looking around for painting tips and tricks to help me improve my technique. In all honesty, I’m a passable painter, who manages to achieve decent results by accident more than anything. My basic  technique usually revolves around a base colour, throwing on some ink for the depth, then trying to highlight up. While this works fine for some miniatures, as I found when painting my Tau, it doesn’t when I want a more crisp finish.


As you might imagine, there are lots of stuff on the internet offering painting tips for gaming miniatures. I found some great articles on Hand Cannon Online, and as these are painting Warmachine/Hordes stuff its even more relevant. However the most useful stuff I’ve found was on the Beasts of War website.

For those that don’t know, Beasts of War started as a YouTube channel where they posted reviews the latest miniature releases, as well as tactics and other random commentary. These days they’ve upgraded to their own website, and continue to release some excellent war gaming related videos.
One of their team is a painter by the name of Romaine. As well as doing some longer how to paint videos, and articles reviewing paint and brush lines, he also has done a series of painting tips videos for the Backstage members of the site. Backstage is a premium section of the site, membership costing £3.49 a month; however these have been so useful, I’m happy to pay that to be able to see them.

There have been tutorials on painting cloth, power armour and zombie flesh, to name but a few, but I think it’s the overall technique involved that has helped me more.

I’ve started to thin my paints down a lot more. To be fair, I tended to be lazy and simply take paint straight from the bottle, even though I knew it was too thick. Even when I did thin them, it tended to be at a 3:1 paint to water ratio. Recently, I’ve been trying closer to 1:1, and combined with using a wet palette (more on that shortly) I’ve been working on my blending. Results are mixed, but show promise; the transitions are
certainly a lot smoother than some of my previous attempts. Multiple thin coats are definitely the way to go, producing a great finish, and when wet blending it works really well.

As a result of watching these videos, I’ve started buying better quality brushes, and looking after them better. Previously, I’d buy synthetic hair brushes, and they’d very quickly loose their point. I did have a few red sable brushes, and found them to be much better to use, although for some reason it didn’t twig that better brushes would perform better. After hearing about Kolinsky Sable brushes, I went and bought a couple of reasonably priced ones, and boy can you tell the difference. They keep their point amazingly well when in use, and generally store more paint so you don’t have to keep refilling the brush. If I had any one tip, then it would be don’t be afraid to buy decent brushes. Go to an art supply shop if your local gaming store doesn’t have a good range. It won’t magically improve your painting, but they will make a difference in the long term.

I mentioned above about a wet palette. Of everything that I’ve picked up, this has to be one of the most useful. We all use a palette of some description to mix our paints, mine is an old AOL CD, and this can be best described as a dry palette. There is nothing wrong with these palettes, painters have been using similar for years. The problem comes when doing any sort of blending; the paint tends to dry out a lot faster than you can use it. It’s even more annoying when you have mixed a specific colour and it ends up drying up before you can paint everything you need to. A wet palette solves these problems, giving you hours (yes, hours!) of paint life.
You can buy wet palettes easy enough in art supply shops, but you can make yourself one for a fraction of the price. All you need is a plastic container of some sort (I use the back of a blister pack), a kitchen sponge
and some baking parchment. Fit the sponge into the container, soak it with water, and then place a piece of the baking parchment over it all. That’s it, you are ready to paint. Because of the wick effect, and the semi-porous nature of the baking parchment, your paint will stay usable for hours. Combine this with an airtight box and a fridge, and you can keep your palette wet for days if you really need to. Not only that, but the non-stick coating means that the paint doesn’t end up painting the palette, meaning you can use all of the paint you put on. About the most difficult thing I found was sourcing some baking parchment. Greaseproof paper is not a viable substitute as its waterproof.

It’s these little things that are giving me more confidence when I start painting. I’m no where near being able to produce Golden Demon level miniatures, but it won’t stop me trying!