Thursday, April 21, 2016

Experiment: Paint a miniature just by washing...

...and one drybrush for highlights.
So jep that is exactly what I wanted to do today. "Painting" a miniature with only washes and one drybrush step. Why? Because I did read quite a lot of fast painting tutorials who exactly did that for armies like Skaven, Goblins or Tyranids. And as you might know, I still have more than 200 Skaven uncounted numbers of Orcs & Goblins and much much more flying around.
Therefore I just wanted to give it a try. Another reason was, that I hadn't painted for half a year now and just wanted to get a feeling for paints again (and find my brushes, paints etc. pp. after the pimping of our office). Excuse the shabby pictures, I just made them with my smartphone to underline the "do as fast as possible" character of this test :)

The model is a custom made one, I don't even know anymore from which models the body and the arm was, I think from a Monk and a Beasthandler. MAybe I am wrong with that, I just grabbed me something in reach.

First step was priming the model with my trusted Vallejo Primer. I saw here some mold lines but really didn't care about them. The complete thing was more a test than wanting to achive some good results. And since tis is rank & file, noone will have a too close look. At least that is what I am hoping for :)

Then I washed it with Army Painter washes (which I reviewed some time ago). Green for the robe, Soft Tone for the fur, Dark Tone for the metal and Strong Tone for the rope and grip. A bit of Red for the tongue finished that step up.
After waiting some minutes to dry the miniature, I continued with washing, exactly the same order exactly the same tones, to strengthen the colors a bit. This time I checked that I put more color into the recesses.
One thing I did see now, is that the old GW Sepia Ink had a bit more orange/redish tone to it, the Soft Tone is much more brown.
After first wash
After second wash

As you can see the second layer of washes has a quite strong effect. I was really surprised.

I then saw, that the miniature lacked highlights which I couldn't change by just washing more. Thus I did "break the rules" and gave the miniature a fast drybrush with Vallejo Elfic Flesh. After that I gave it the third and last wash.
This time I broke up the washes a bit and mixed some blue into the Dark Tone and some Red into the Browns to introduce a bit of variation, e.g. for the metals and the tail
Then I glued it to a selfmade base and was done.


Is this the best paint job ever done? Well surely not! But it was super fast and had a surprising effect. With some short investment (doing the metals with metallic paint, putting some highlights) this could be ok as a rank & file.

Have to test a bit more with this heavy washing over just a primer. Up until now I only used washes for creating shadows, not for creating base colors.

Experiment succesfull! And I painted finally something!


So long,
Paradox0n

6 comments:

  1. Because the washes are transparent, you can get the highlight look by doing a lighter coat of primer to catch highlights on certain surfaces. Zenithal priming works exceptionally well when your paint is mostly transparent!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah the 2k priming would also have helped but my white primer was empty :)
      Maybe should have loaded my Airbrush with white paint and do a zenithal highlight. But it was an experiment, no? :)

      Delete
  2. Now that is interesting and works really well!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I was also surprised :)
      Maybe I will play a bit more with thiw technique, could work well in batch painting. As soon as you finish the last one, the washes on the first one should be try already.

      Delete

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