Painting the graveyard

Earlier today on the Lead-Adventures forum I was asked how I'd painted the brickwork and rooftops on the building to your left.  I don't really have any step by step photos from this one, but I'll try and remember to do some photos next time around and update this tutorial a bit.


Brickwork 

1) Start with a white undercoat
2) Do an 70/30 mix of VMC Green Ochre/water over all of the brickwork so that it flows nicely over the whole thing without getting lumpy. It should also give you some initial colour variations and leave to dry.
3) Do a 60/40 mix of VMC Green Ochre and VMC Deck Tan and drybrush over the whole thing.
4) Do a 30/70 mix of VMC Green Ochre and VMC Deck Tan and drybrush over the whole thing.
5) Do a wash of GW Gryphonne Sepia into the shadowed areas, especially between the bricks and under overhangs.
6) Do another wash of Gryphonne Sepia over some of the bricks to change the overall colour of some bricks. You can also do this with a black wash for some really different bricks.
7) Do a very light drybrush of white over the whole lot to finish the brickwork.

To get the really worn, stained look there are two final steps, but these involve more advanced weathering materials.

8) To get the green mould stains on the bricks paint some streaks and spots of the AK Interactive Slimy Grime Light weathering liquid. With a damp brush blend the green areas into the brickwork a bit so it's not quite so vibrant.
9) For the muddy, dirty look around the bottom, gently brush on some dark weathering powder, like Forgeworld Dark earth. You don't want too much, just enough to get stuck in the paint's texture.

For the rusty gate I gave it a black undercoat and then dotted on some of the Model Mates Rust Effect. It's probably one of the best weathering liquids I've come across as it created a nice rusty patina without anything else needing to be done.

The roof was an interesting experiment that involved a number of rounds of "does this look right to you?"

1) Start with a patchy undercoat of VMC Field Blue over a white undercoat
2) Do a watery (60/40) mix of VMC Leather Brown/Water over the top of this to darken it up a bit and give the bluey/grey a brown tint and shadows.
3) Water down some GW Temple Guard Blue (60/40 - paint/water) and start painting thin stripes down the roof as if the water hits the top and runs all the way down. You don't need to be too neat about this as any runoff or spashes onto the brickwork below the roof just looks like dirty runoff ;)
4) Keep building up the layers of this green, making sure it's streaky and patchy.
5) Do some small stipples of neat Temple Guard Blue in some areas for a really bright patina
6) A final wash of Devlan Mud into the shadows and around the edges gives you a bit of depth and pop.

I hope those were useful. I'll try to get some pictures next time around

Painting deep reds

Reds are always a tricky one to get right, but I think I cracked a nice deep red and thought someone else may be interested in the recipe. Sadly the red I used has been discontinued and I've not really locate a decent replacement yet, but any deep red should work.

1) Base coat Mechrite Red over black.
2) Paint the shaded areas with a 50/50 mix of Mechrite red and scorched brown
3) Paint deeper shadows with a 25/75 mix Mechrite red and scorched brown
4) Paint the deepest shadows with 50/50 mix of scorched brown and black
5) Paint some of the highlighted areas with a 75/25 mix of Mechrite red and vomit brown
6) paint tiny lines of a 50/50 mix of Mechrite red and vomit brown on as the highlights.

White space marine helmets

Reading back through my Dakka threads, I found a post about painting this marine helmet; sadly I don't have the model any more as it was a gift, but it was certainly an effective way of painting white. I'll try again when I dig all my bits out of storage.

To get a nice, crisp white helmet try the following:

- white undercoat
- Paint thinned VMC Silvergrey in the shadowy areas, leaving about 50% of the helmet pure white
- Paint some sepia wash into the recesses of the Silvergrey areas
- Paint another thin layer of sepia wash in some of the darker areas of the silvergrey once the first layer is dry
- Paint a 50/50 mix of Sepia and black wash into the very dark areas of the shadows.

The trick is not to give the full model a wash, but to just concentrate on the shadows so you leave the pure white untouched.

Quick Zombie recipie

So yesterday I was bemoaning the fact that I didn't like where the zombies were going. Today I can happily say that an evening's work has rectified some of the problems and I now have 8 finished and another 4 nearly finished.

 

This lack of decent lighting setup (and a dead battery this morning) is killing me, but  you get the idea behind this lot anyway. The main tactic for these is going to be block colours, followed by multiple different coloured washes to give the right tones.

For example, the black trousers start off dark grey and get a black wash all over, with things like the knees wiped off before it dries. This gives a fairly basic shadow/highlight and generally darkens the whole thing. Then the knees and the bottom parts of the trousers get a secondary wash of brown for staining and makes it look a little more realistic.

The skin is a base coat of VMC Deck Tan mixed with a bit of white as this gives quite a pale, lifeless skin tone to start with. A 50/50 mix of black wash and devlan mud is then carefully painted into the eye sockets, mouth and any dark places like under the hands.  Next up thin lines of devlan mud are painted around some of the muscles, between the fingers and where skin meets clothing to provide some shadowy contrasts and remove the general flatness to things. By this point you'll be thinking that it's going to be looking a bit too healthy for a zombie and you'd be correct. This is where some careful application of purple and green washes to the eyes and cheeks start to bring an unhealthy glow back to the show. We can even add some bruising with a few dots of purple, green and black to the skin.

Once the base model is done, it's time to apply the blood. I've seen people splatter blood all over the place, but I like to be in more control, so I'm stippling on some VMA Hull Red first as this is a nice dark, dried on blood colour. As it is intended to be used in an airbrush it's about half way between a wash and normal Vallejo paint consistency, so on dark clothing it stains, but still allows some of the base colour to shine through; which is perfect. Over the top of this we then stipple a slightly smaller amount of Scab Red for some slightly fresher blood. Once you've varnished them (which I stupidly forgot to do last night before basing them on the acrylic), paint a bit of gloss varnish over some of the fresher blood for that extra wet gore feel.

I think now I've got that all worked out, I can try working my way through the rest of the horde!

The missing gaps represent models that are on the painting table; the right column contains the bonus model that I get to do once I have finished a row of zombies.Wish me luck!

The Inquisitor's gold recipe

One of the bits from the Eavy Metal masterclass was being shown how to get extra contrast in your metallics and make them look more realistic than simply slapping a wash over the top. Some master painters can achieve insanely good looking armour with non metallics, which is a style called NMM (non-metallic metals). I've still not managed to master that one... it's really tricky; mode on that one later.

This style is based upon that, but uses metallics and washes to much greater effect and is referred to as MNMM: Metallic Non Metallic Metals. Again, I've still not quite got the hang of it yet, but the general theory should be pretty clear.

For this we're going to take the Inquisitor that you saw in an earlier post and detail the gold on his armour and staff. Normally you'd see people paint the gold directly over the undercoat, give it a wash of Devlan or sepia and possibly a small highlight of a lighter gold. It looks fine in rank and file troops, but not quite so masterful on characters.

The starting point for gold is getting a nice smooth base coat. Gold paint is notoriously bad for going on smoothly, so you've probably noticed you need a few coats and it end up blobbing everywhere? The simple answer to that is to mix (50/50-ish) in a dark reddish brown, such as the GW Scorched Brown, for the first layer. The non metallic paint particles mix with the gold and help improve it's coverage and evens out the gold particles, which want to clump together. This also gives you your deepest shadows.

Cover this with a wash of sepia ink to provide a richer finish and hide any inaccuracies in the mix. Once the wash has dried, we can start blending the colours back up to your original gold colour before you mixed in the dark brown. For me this was probably only two steps; first start with your original mix over the wash, leaving the darkest recesses untouched; then reduce the mixture to 75/25 Gold/Brown and then pure gold.


Once the golds are done, paint some very watered down Scorched brown into the shadows, followed by a 50/50 Scorched Brown/Black mixture into the deepest recesses and shadows.

The final finishing point is a very thin highlight of pure silver to the edges.

That all sounds rather complicated, yes? I think the gold on the Inquisitor model above took 10 minutes in total as the blending works best when it's all still wet... so it's a lot easier than it sounds. The important thing to remember while painting in the shadows and highlights are to think about your light source so the shadows fall naturally on the model; but that is for another article and something I still need to work on myself.

Learning to cast resin

While I'm on a roll resurrecting old tutorials, here's some notes from my ventures into casting. I'll go back and revisit this sometime in the future and flesh it out a bit more, but it may be of use to someone in it's current state.

There's a shed load of stuff you need, all of them pretty cheap to get hold of and useful. I kept having to do trips into town at the weekends to pick up something else :

- RTV rubber
- the fast cast resin
- plasticine
- wooden spatulas (either buy lots of cheap ice lollies from Asda and feel refreshed each time you make a mold or cast, or Tomps sell boxes of 100)
- syringes
- lots of lego blocks, preferably the 2x4 or longer, plus a large, thin base
- plastic party cups (50p for 100 from Asda)
- Vaseline.
- a cheap brush
- something to melt vaseline in, I've got a cheap curry bowl from Poundland
- some decent scales; the more accurate the better.
- lots of old sprues to make the pouring channels in the molds
- Talc

JB's casting tutorial in the Articles section of DakkaDakka.com is pretty good, with a few modifications as noted below. I think most of the variations are because I couldn't get hold of the molding putty he used in the UK without paying a fortune to import it. In the UK, the best place to get resin and the RTV rubber is http://www.tomps.com , they were quick to respond to my questions and are planning on putting together a beginner's pack sometime soon. Just don't be fooled into buying the casting manual they have... the useful bits are already on their website; the rest you really don't need.

1. Why the Vaseline?
A number of tutorials suggest putting a layer of olive oil on the first half of the mould. this may work if you're using putty that JB uses. This doesn't seem to stop the RTV rubber from sticking together though, so a thin layer of melted vaseline painted over the rubber (not the models!) will help you not to make a large blue rubber block. Painting over the models as well will obscure details, making the casting process pretty pointless. You can use a spray can of release agent, but Tomps didn't think it was necessary while I was learning as I'm unlikely to want the early molds to last too long.

2. Why the Talc?
The first test cast I did came out minus most of the smaller details. There were no visible air bubbles in the casts, it just didn't seem to have made it into all the corners so everything looked a little melty. A layer of talc on the two halves of the rubber before casting (with the excess shaken off of course) seems to help the resin flow into some more details; though it's still not 100% crisp, but this may have been to talc being missing in some placed.

3. Why the syringe?
Leaving gravity to do it all may work if you're only doing one or two large bits, but if you're trying to do smaller things like rifles with fiddly bits, you're going to need some pressure to get it flowing through the vents. Be careful not to push the syringe into the channels when injecting the resin though as you'll push the two halves apart and cause leakage/air bubbles.

4. where's the elastic bands mentioned in the Article?
The first time I tried casting, I did have elastic bands and card around the molds, but it didn't seem to be working very well. The molds were deforming and I was getting a lot of leakage and air bubbles. Luckily the two molds that I'd made, side by side, can be secured between lego blocks on the base. This allows nice even pressure across everything apart from the top. It's not stopped the flash from forming, but it's now significantly less than with the elastic band. I think I just need to put more bits of card in between the molds and the lego, to increase the pressure slightly.

5. Think about the placement of your pieces in the mold
As the title says... think carefully and make sure there aren't any bits that are going to trap air.you are injecting the resin in, so you'll need somewhere for the air to come out. I found it best to have the channel going down the side and along the bottom with some air vents coming out of the top. Always try to angle any pieces so there aren't any corners that bubbles will get trapped in.

6. Indentations and a simple solution
When it came to creating my first mold I noticed that I'd sculpted some recesses that were going to cause a massive problem, then I had a brainwave. Using a bit of green stuff I created some little plugs that are molded to the recessed area and a hooked area at the top. When you create the mold halves, make sure this piece is sitting in the recessed area properly. When you go to create an actual cast, carefully place the plugs back into the now empty mold so that they will allow you to create recessed areas that a 2 part mold wouldn't normally like.  They easily pop out and leave you with a recessed area. *tada!* I wouldn't suggest using too many things like this though as you're bound to forget to put them in (like I did for test cast 2) and you end up with an odd hooked lump on your piece. You also need to remember to put a little bit of vaseline on this, otherwise the resin can stick to the greenstuff plug.

7. What about all these rubbish test molds?
You don't need to throw them away. Keep them; slice them up into little bits and put them around the edges when pouring in your RTV to create a new mold. As long as there's no release agent or vaseline on them they will stick to the new rubber, bulking out the mold and saving you some precious rubber

What else?

A number of people recommend vacuum chambers or pressure pots. If you're only doing basic, fairly plain things I don't think they are necessary. They may, however, be the answer to me getting more detailed casting... though it's rather expensive to shell out a couple of hundred pounds on a theory. A vibrating plate that you sit the molds onto would help to bump some of the bubbles out of your mold. Poundland occasionally has "personal massagers" that would be good for making something like this

Messing up tanks 101

I mentioned to Mathyoo that I would put up something about weathering powders, so here's something I wrote on another forum a few years back after going on the Forge World Tank Masterclass day, updated slightly with some clearer descriptions (writing isn't my forte).

The Masterclass was run by Phil Stutcinskas and Mark Bedford, who took us through some of the may tips and tricks that they use to paint tanks for the Imperial Armour books.

It became a running joke throughout the day that Phil and Mark obviously had shares in Gloss Varnish as he uses it for nearly every technique they took us through. Annoyingly the shop in Warhammer World hadn't been aware of this and didn't have any stock.

As part of the event costs we were given a built, undercoated Hellhound so we didn't need to waste time constructing a model to them paint. Seeing everyone take the same model in different directions was as useful as the proper guidance.



Waterslide Transfers
The first thing they took us through was how to apply transfers so that they don't peel off and don't look fake. I've avoided using transfers for ages as I could never quite get them to sit right on a textured vehicle; they always have a slightly silvery look and had a visible edge. The trick to fixing both these is magic. Well, not really. Before applying any transfers, give the area you want to apply the transfer to a thin coat of gloss varnish; this give you a nice smooth surface to work with, which removes the silvery finish. It turns out that that is millions of tiny air bubbles caught underneath the decal, which not only visibly changes the quality, but causes it to flake off over time.

After you've placed the transfer and let it dry, paint another thin coat of varnish over the top to seals it all, so it's never coming off. This varnish also smooths out the raised edges of the transfer a bit too, making it blend into the model. If you still have a visible edge, apply some more gloss varnish along the edges to try and level it all off. For curved or textured surfaces they suggested looking at the Sol and Set decal fixatives, but I've not had the chance to try those yet. Transfers should be done before any weathering as they represent the factory fresh vehicle.


Chipping paint

Chipped paint was next up on the agenda. I've tried to do chipping with a sponge before, but never got it looking nice enough. Previously I'd just been stippling on the darker colour for the metal. What I should have been doing is a mixture of tones. The first step is a stippling of a lighter version of the base tank colour, so in this case a lighter grey. To get the worn tank look we don't want to go all the way down to bare metal as that isn't all that realistic, so we create a mixture of dark brown and black to represent the undercoat and stipple that over the top of the lighter chipping. Putting chipping over the transfers not only helps support the wear and tear effect we are going for, but also helps blend them into the mode more effectively. I'd also been underdoing it and kept being told to add more…



You can also use the sponge for doing scratches by carefully dragging the nearly dry sponge along the surface.



Grime

So far we've added markings and then wrecked the paintwork... but the remaining paint is all very clean... we need to start aging the tank by building up grime around rivets and joins. It's really quick to do and gives a really good start without having to worry about powders quite yet.

Tip 1. Forgeworld don't like Devlan Miracle, they think it's too grey and takes the life out of models, so they use a mixture of Gryphonne sepia and black for a richer, more vibrant brown.

Tip 2. In order to control the wash more effectively, and give you more working time, don't just add water as this will separate the pigments and give you a very odd look. Adding some of Magic, multi-tool Gloss Varnish to the mixture will create a slightly thinner version of the wash that won't separate the pigments. You can also use gloss varnish to make washes out of any other paints in case there isn't one for the colour you need.

When placing the wash onto the model, work on it one horizontal plane at a time, letting it dry before moving on so you don't get the washes flowing down and creating tide marks. Don't just slap on a thick layer of wash and hope, take it slowly and imagine the wash is a paint. For each area we washed it with the mixture and then use a clean brush to carefully remove any excess from the larger flat areas.



By adding in oranges/yellows to the wash, you can start to create simple rust effects around rivets



Tip 3 If you've got a dark tank, don't make the washes darker, it's unrealistic. As mentioned earlier, we can create washes with gloss varnish and any paint, so with a nice sandy colour we can start to build up a lighter dust around rivets and in crevaces instead. I haven't got a photo of this as it doesn't show up very well on the light grey tank… but it's something I'll try on my own later.

The main area that I wanted some help with was weathering powders as I've not quite got the hang of this on my own. It turns out I was nearly there... there are two ways that Phil and Mark use on the powders; each one gives a slightly different effect.



The first one (see the track area) is some gloss varnish (see, it gets used for everything!) with some powder mixed in. This creates a thick, blobby mess that starts to look a bit like mud that can just be added onto the vehicle. While this goop is still wet, put some dry powder on in random blotches so you get a mixture of tones. The wet varnish will soak into this dry powder and stick it on.

The other way of doing it is to apply the powder dry and then carefully put some white spirit onto the area (see rear panel above). You can then use a clean brush and some white spirit to clean up any areas that you don't want as much powder on as well as rubbing a bit off with your fingers. This will give you more of a stain, rather than a thick build-up.

A light coat of spray varnish over the top will seal it all on forever; though be careful as too heavy a coat will start to dissolve the powders and weaken the effect.


Tank tracks

Instead of building up thick layers of mud (as above), we may want to have a more dusty look to the tank tracks. To do this, paint your tracks a dark brown/black and then wash with a mixture of a light sandy colour and… surprise! gloss varnish. Gently wipe off the excess and you will be left with a sandy looking substance between the links.

Once the wash has dried, gently rub some of the Dark Iron weathering powder (or graphite powder as that's cheaper) over the tracks to give the raised surfaces a nice metallic look. You can do the same to all of the chipping on the main tank to give a bit of a metallic edge to the chips without using silver.







Water stains

The last thing they went through was water stains and running oils. Take a wild guess. Yep, you got it. Gloss varnish and whatever colour you want to stain your tank with. Make this wash very very thin and just do multiple layers, building up the layers.

It took a few attempts after the masterclass to get it looking right on my own, but here's an example of using all these techniques together on one model