More miniature painting with Army Painter Quickshade - this time zombies

While looking for zombie-themed game ideas, I stumbled across this on Twitter which made me smile - it was a group of people discussing how best to prepare for the inevitable soon-to-be-upon-us zombie apocalypse:

As a mortician, I always tie the shoelaces together of the dead. Cause if there is ever a zombie apocalypse, it will be hilarious.

Now that's forward planning!
Having spent too long in front of the computer over the last few days, I thought it best to spend a few hours catching up with a bit of painting. I think I'm slowly developing my own style. Whether it's an actual style, or just not being too bothered about making a miniature look any better than "alright" I'm not sure. I think my style is summed up as "that'll do".

I'm also getting quicker at painting miniatures. But maybe that's because I've gone from "this needs to be really good" to "I think I'll get away with that". I'm not interested in blending and multi-layer gradients. I just want playing pieces that will look good in a few photos and on the board.

I wanted to find out exactly how fast I can "get away with" painting a bunch of miniatures using the Army Painter method. I'd hoped to paint a batch of seven zombies in just a couple of evenings. Even as I started, I thought this might be a bit adventurous - but still I thought that perhaps five might be realistically achievable.

My current painting technique is:

Spray a number of miniatures with the appropriate primer (so far I've only got white and grey, but I hope to expand on this in future - I guess it depends which kind of minis I'm likely to be painting in future)

Slap on the basic colour(s). This is a "messy" step - it doesn't matter really where the paint goes (if I had another primer, I might have base-coated all the minis in this slightly green-y flesh colour)

After this I sometimes do a bit of touching up. My Army Painter yellows and reds are not very good at covering up other colours. If I know I'm likely to use one of these "weaker" colours, I'll touch up any messy edges with white before applying the second colour.

Next, block in the remaining colours - making sure the edges are good, solid lines.
I use either a Citadel "standard orange" or an Army Painter "regiment" brush for these (whichever is first to hand). These slightly larger brushes (they're certainly bigger than the detail brushes) mean they hold more paint, which actually makes painting fiddly edges easier than a smaller brush.

I try to keep the number of colours per miniature to two or three at most. I also use much brighter colours than I expect the miniature to end up with. This is because the QuickShade will tone down the base colours quite a bit.

Here's the miniatures after applying the QuickShade (I use a brush rather than dipping) and both before and after a good 24 hour drying and some Testor's Dullcote:

So it took all of one evening to get the miniatures base-coloured and QuickShaded. It takes about 24 hours for the QuickShade to dry, and an hour or so for the Dullcote to harden, ready to take more paints. So by the second evening (some time well after Pointless) it's time to paint in some details and add a few highlights.

On this fat guy I couldn't find a bright colour to add highlights to the tracksuit, so just went with the original orangey-yellow. The effect is more noticeable than in the photo, but it's still not as striking as some other miniatures I've painted.

The zip and the white piping on the tracksuit took a steady hand, but I'm slowly learning to control the shakes when it comes to the smaller details. The spots I painted red, then topped off with a bone colour to make them look like angry red, pus-filled spots, just ready to burst!

I much prefer the highlighting on this second model. The technique was exactly the same - paint, shade, dullcote, highlight.

For the highlights I went two or three shades "brighter" than the base colour. The jeans, for example, were painted in Ultramarine blue, which goes quite dark after shading. It's tempting to highlight with the same blue, for a subtle effect. I prefer the Electric blue highlights which almost glow against the darker blue. True, it doesn't make the trousers look like demin - but you can see the highlights even from a distance. My reasoning is, if you're going to take the time and trouble to highlight your miniatures, why not make them really visible?

Sadly, I'm still rubbish at painting hair.
The rest of the models (both the fat guy and the girl) look fine. I managed to get the eyes and teeth painted in the right places and the shading and highlighting - though simple - make the miniatures stand out nicely. It's just a shame that the shonky hair painting spoils the rest of the model.

If anyone has any tips on painting hair, please leave comments below!

More miniature painting - Wild West cowboys

Work in progress.

We're not even sure that these guys all belong in the same "gang". We've yet to even begin to think about how the rules for an (electronic) Wild West board game would play. So while we're trying to work it out, here's a shot of some western style miniatures, all painted exclusively using the Army Painter/Quickshade system.

Here's a few things we learned along the way:

• Subtle highlights are no highlights. There's no point highlighting a dulled down grey with an almost-the-same-but-slightly-lighter grey. True, it creates a really natural, subtle effect. But in the world of miniatures, big, bright and bold is better - unless you're an expert painter, putting in days (and even weeks) into each model, emphasis and exaggeration make for a decent paintjob, quickly!
• Leaving the basing to the end causes it's own problems - particularly painting glue and drybrushing around the feet. In future we're going to base our models first.
• Every paint stroke needs to be bold and look intentional. A thin, wobbly, wispy line may pick out a raised ridge, but it'll always look either half-finished, or it was an accident. Make each line obvious and deliberate and the miniature will look all the better for it (even if it's not quite in the right place!)
• Keep the number of different colours to a minimum, to keep a consistent colour scheme running through the miniature. Different shades are fine (in fact, necessary, to highlight details) but a limited palette gives a much more dramatic effect - especially if just one or two smaller details are picked out in a completely different colour
• Freehand painting patterns and shapes on large areas really improves the look of a model - provided you make a good job of it. Badly painted lines (like the stripes on our sheriff!) add nothing and actually detract from the rest of the paintwork!

 water down the PVA glue too much and the basing material just falls off when it's dry!

 even when glued down properly, go easy with the drybrushing, else you'll just scrub all the basing material off the base!

leaving the PVA too thick results in a similar problem - the basing material clumps together and leaves bald patches on the base

finally we got the glue consistency right - a nice, thick, well-covered base, drybrushed and finished to a half-decent standard.

With these miniatures based, we're going to call them finished and move on to some others now.

So far we've got a number of different genres identified for our electronic board game so there are plenty more miniatures still to paint!

More miniatures painting - Wild West characters

During a few hours this weekend (the storms are brewing and it's cold and windy outside, so it's better to be indoors, wrapped up and warm!) I painted up a couple of Wild West characters. I started with two well known "cowboys" - Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett.

Using the Army Painter Quickshade method of painting, the first thing to do is block out all the basic colours. For these models, I'm trying something I've never done before and that's to paint the black for the eye outlines before applying QuickShade. The reason for this is, if I paint the black after and slip with the paintbrush, it can be quite difficult to match the surrounding colour to paint over any mistakes. Any mistakes made at this stage can be easily covered up, using just the pure flesh base colour.

The rest of the colours are deliberately garish and bright before applying the Quickshade. My reasoning is this: I love the bright, heavily saturated colour palette used in late 80s, early 90s Games Workshop 'Eavy Metal showcases. 

But using Quickshade tones down any colour scheme quite considerably. That said, a darkened model, with brilliant, bright highlights invokes this same high-contrast colour scheme as with early GW paint-jobs (without the need to be such a brilliant model painter!). So this is my current painting method:

1. block out the basic colours, using bright, vibrant shades
2. slather on some Strong Tone QuickShade
3. apply some Testor's DullCote matt varnish
4. edge highlight (and tidy up) the miniature using the original selection of colours
5. paint tiny details (faces, eyes, buttons etc)

Done!

Here's Billy The Kid and the cowardly snake-in-the-grass Pat Garrett, pretty much finished - only the bases and some tiny bits of touching up are needed to finish them off:

While it's very tempting to stick to a palette of grey and brown (the Wild West was a dirty, grubby place and not many outlaws wore flamboyant, brightly coloured garments) it's also important to keep the miniatures looking interesting - so I chose a pastel green and a splash of bright red for Billy's neckerchief.

While Pat Garrett was known to Billy the Kid (some historians go as far to say the two were friends) I wanted to emphasise that Pat was no longer "one of the guys" so painted him up with richer colours - a velvet waistcoat and red-lined overcoat along with a pale-coloured suade jacket make him stand apart from the other gang members, physically as well as spiritually  (the stripey trousers were a bit of a failure! They need re-doing). The idea is to convey that he's got a bit more money (after being made a sheriff) so is more interested in having nicer clothes than any gang of outlaws.

The free-hand on these legs are not very good - I might just repaint them and stick with a complete solid colour, although patterned trousers do add a bit more interest to this model.

The photos don't really do the miniatures justice: I need to sort out a proper lighting rig and learn how to take photos - the minis do look much better in real life! These photos were taken at night, under flourescent lighting and with a harsh LED flash on the camera; with a proper photo-rig, I might be able to show the colours properly.

But that's it for tonight: two models painted up over the course of an evening which isn't really bad going for me! A few more and we'll have enough to try out a simple gunfight skirmish when the PCBs arrive for our electronic board game....

Creating a sci-fi industrial base for our space-themed miniatures

Just a quick update on our sci-fi soldiers/robots miniatures - having struggled to come up with anything suitable for the bases for our miniatures (except some excellent looking modelling-putty-stamps on Kickstarter) we eventually hit on a solution: curtain netting.

Or more specifically, that weird netting they sell in Fabric Land on Western Road in Brighton - the stuff that comes in all colours and is usually used for frills on skirts and to make tu-tus from. That stuff.

A liberal dose of glue was put over the bases and the netting stretched and glued in place. Once the glue had dried, the netting was trimmed from around the edges of the base using a craft knife, and the entire base was painted black

The entire base was drybrushed with gun metal paint. The idea was to get a dark silvery colour over the whole of the base, not just the raised industrial-grid-like pattern, so drybrushing was done with the brush vertical (at 90 degrees to the plane of the base)

This allowed the bristles to get onto the actual base between the mesh, but still kept a dark shadow effect under each hole in the grill. Then the entire base was drybrushed with a brighter, shining armour silver. This time the brush was held almost horizontally, so that the drybrushing only touched the top surface of the grid pattern

The end result was an industrial looking base which fits in perfectly with our spaceship-themed playing surface:

Removing QuickShade shine with Testors DullCote

There are plenty of posts about "frosting" when using matt varnish all over the internet. We've had a right old time with it on a few plastic miniatures too, and were beginning to wonder if this Quickshade was going to work out for us after all.

One solution that comes up again and again is (to brush on some) Testor's Dull Cote.

This morning the postie knocked on the door and handed over our latest eBay purchase. Here's a before and after of the models:

Before DullCote - after applying QuickShade and allowing to dry for 24 hours:

Quickshade does a great job of picking out the details while keeping the colours from looking too muddy (an effect that often occurs using GW/Citadel Devlan Mud ink for shading) but makes the miniature look very glossy.

After applying DullCote:

The miniature on the left has Dullcote applied which is mostly dry - the model on the right has Dullcote applied but is still wet (which is why there's still a bit of a sheen on the paintwork)

The Testor's DullCote works just fine for us. It removes the shine off the QuickShade without affecting the colouring or intensity of the colours it's painted over. The lacquer was ready to paint over (with simple highlights and facial details) in about an hour or so and the final model not only had a nice, matt finish, it's always reassuring to know the model has had a coat of varnish which will protect all but the top-most coat(s) of paint.

Using the Army Painter method of painting multiple miniatures at once, and with the help of my new cheapo wet palette, I managed to finish three more space-soldiers this afternoon. 

That makes five. Ideally I'd like each team in the Starship Raiders game to have six or more characters. But I've only five leaded soldiers, so we'll just have to go with five for now!

Here's how they could look on a modular board section:

Sadly the bases are really letting the miniatures down now - time to ask Mr Google how best to finish the bases so that they fit in with the industrial/sci-fi style board.

Painting miniatures with a wet palette and Army Painter paints

What's a wet palette?
I had no idea too, until I realised that my painting technique was changing over the course of 10 or 20 minutes. At first, the paint is really smooth and sometimes takes two coats to cover darker shades. Then, maybe 10-15 minutes later, it's thickened up and is covering really easily. That's great for block colouring, but a bit of a pain using the same paint for little details (which are more easily painted using thinner, easier-flowing paint).

I've been burning through my Army Painter paints, regularly dropping paints onto my ceramic palette (an upturned espresso cup!). Mixing paints from the dropper bottles is great, but because my paints are drying out so quickly, I'm finding I'm using a lot of paint and not actually getting much painted!

The answer? A wet palette.
I'd heard of these, but never bothered with them - it sounds too much like advanced techniques for really good painters (wet blending, gradient shading and so on). It turned out it's nothing like that. It's just a way of creating a palette which keeps the paint wet for longer.

Wet palettes can be bought at most art shops and even online. You can pay anywhere between £10 and £50 for a decent set up. I'm not bothered about decent. Cheap and cheerful will do me, until I know what it actually is/does!

Here are the ingredients for my wet palette. The maths set cost £1, the sponges 90p and the baking paper £1.20 (all from Tesco) - total cost: £3.10.

I took one sponge, cut the green scouring pad off and split it in half long-ways. Using a sharp knife (only ever use sharp knives - blunt ones are really dangerous!) I cut the moulded bits inside the maths set box and put wet sponges inside the box. The baking paper is folded to help it resisting curling as it gets wet.

As a trial, I put some "fur brown" paint onto the paper and used a bit on a model.
I chose this paint because it tends to be quite thin to begin with, but skins over - and once a skin has formed, it tends to dry out quite quickly (within another 10 minutes or so). I rinsed my brushes, closed the palette lid and went and made a brew.

Then I went to the shop and got a paper. After reading the paper I got a bit peckish, so made some cheap instant noodles. Then another brew, and after a total of an hour and a half, I tried the paint. It was still fluid and usable. Not only usable, but in the same condition as it was when it first came out of the bottle: no skinning over, no thickening, it still took two coats to cover the slightly darker colours on a model.

So in short - a successful, cheap wet palette. Hopefully this means I'll be reaching for the bottles of paint much less often and can concentrate on smudging paint over the miniatures rather than mixing and dispensing it.

More miniatures painting

The PCBs are designed, tested, and on order now - just need to wait about 10 days for the first batch of ten from the manufacturer so we can try out some prototype boards - very exciting!

While we're waiting for the boards back, there's still plenty to do.
So of course, everything else has gone on hold and we're back to painting miniatures. Or at least, I am!

I'm trying the Army Painter method of cranking out miniatures, but I'm not very good at it. I know the theory - get one colour and paint it onto all miniatures, get the next, paint it across all your miniatures and so on. A quick splash of QuickShade and some highlighting and you're done.

That's fine - except it means it's a lot time between taking your first primed miniature and seeing a finished model (although using the A/P method, you do end up with about 10 finished miniatures all at once).
I've been painting two or three at a time, and that's plenty for me!

Having not painted miniatures for a long time, I've forgotten the most important rule: knowing when to stop. Knowing when to say "if I carry on, I'll more than likely make this model worse, rather than improve it" is a skill, as much as keeping a steady hand to get the right blob of colour in the right place with a paintbrush.

So I've decided it's time to stop with these models.
 I can't do all the fancy blending and shading and ultra-realistic looking effects. But these models are about as good as I can get them without messing them up, so it's time to say "they're done". Well, as far as painting goes anyway (finishing the bases is another minefield I've yet to negotiate).

The eagle-eyed will already have spotted a few brush-slips here and there, but in the main, they're good enough to go on to our first prototype game boards (once they're built).

The black-and-yellow stripes on the robot are a bit wonky but, having decided these are finished, they'll just have to stay like that (knowing when to stop is a skill I'm slowly learning).

Most nerds are familiar with tabletop war-gaming, 28mm miniatures and the like. When I first asked at BuildBrighton if anyone had any experience with miniature gaming, there was complete silence. Over eighty people had no idea what I was talking about. But slowly, over the last few weeks, more and more have started to take an interest in the board game project, and have started saying things like "I think I had some miniatures once.... Space somethings.... Space Marines I think" and a few have even admitted to not only playing, but also painting miniatures for various board games over the years!

For the non-gaming nerds, here's a photo to try to show the scale of these models:

(the minis in this photo have been QuickShaded but not yet dull-coated so they're super-shiny. The coin in the photo is a modern UK 50 pence piece)

In my younger days, I might have wanted a finish like the McVey Studio miniatures.

These days I'm just thrilled that my eyes hold out enough to get the basic colours in roughly the right areas!

Next, it's time to learn how to finish the bases for miniatures onboard a space ship (the usual textured-sand-and-drybrush finish for a grass-effect  base would just look weird).

These "stampers" on Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1843680961/base-stampers-textured-base-stamps-for-miniature-w) look great but might be difficult to use, given I've superglued the miniatures in place on the bases. I think in future I need to look at the base and the model separately then just join them together at the end.

Right now, however, I'm just pleased that I've got three miniatures "finished" and another four or five almost ready to join them!

Army Painter Ink Stand

It was another of those frustrating can't-seem-to-get-anything-done-tonight nights at BuildBrighton last night. I took all the wrong gear along (wrong PIC chips to code up for our electronic board game, forgot the clamp for the SOIC programmer, there was no solder left at the space anyway) so left the electronics-y stuff and made another stand for my Army Painter paints.

Thankfully the laser cutter was behaving (though cutting at 15% speed to ensure a good cut is painfully and tediously slow) so I managed to get this knocked up in a pretty short space of time:

Sometimes you just need to  make something - however simple - to make it all feel worthwhile :)
Here's a link to the SVG for making one - https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9HAI5y47e_WdjdSeEFUREJjWUE/edit?usp=sharing

The centre hole is for 16mm dowel - 15mm is more common, so edit in Inkscrape as necessary.
Inks and paints together look pretty cool. Now I just need to learn how to use them to paint some decent miniatures!

Army Painter Quickshade Inks - more experimenting

After a weekend of painting (and repairing the allotment shed roof) I'm in two minds about Quickshade.

The initial use of it on some Tyranids and Cadian Troopers was very encouraging - it brought out the details beautifully with very little effort, and added a layer of varnish protection over the paintwork.

I've already ruined a couple of miniatures using the anti-shine matt paint outdoors, in the cold, possibly when it was a bit too damp. So this time, I was determined to follow the instructions to the letter, and make sure conditions were perfect for spraying. I made a little spray booth in the kitchen, made sure it wasn't too hot, nor too cold and sprayed from not less than 20cm and not more than 25cm away - in fact, pretty much everything the Army Painter guys said to do.

The result?

More badly powdered, frosty-looking miniatures, complete with crazing effects! In short, a terrible finish and more miniatures destined for the bin.

With this in mind, I've been trying the water-based 100% colour-match strong tone ink. I love the tin of dip idea, but if it's going to create such rubbish looking results, I'll stick with the water-based ones. But they are not quite the 100% colour match claimed on the label:

The model in the centre was coated with the tin of brown gloop, the outer models using the water-based acrylic strong tone. 100% colour match? Not really.

Personally, I think the effect on the robot models using the water-based strong tone looks just right for them. Dirty, grimy, industrial-looking is just right for robots on the battlefield. But there's also a massive dis-colouration, whereas the brown gloop keeps a lot more of the original colour, and a lot of the underlying vibrancy of the colours.

Water-based strong-tone is great for achieving a dirty-looking industrial effect

The dirty grimy look isn't ideal for all miniatures though - these were heavily discoloured using the water-based strong tone. So much, that I had to re-paint the shaded colour with the original base-coat. This has got rid of the nice shaded effect that Quickshade gives, and now looks more like the two-tone light-on-dark painting scheme I was trying to get away from.

There's much discussion online about "frosting" of miniatures. Apparently it's not uncommon when using spray varnish - so far we've not had great results (and at the same time, had some really cool results) using both the brown gloop and the water-based strong tone. 

While I really like the effect on the robots using the water-based toner, I think the brown gloop is much better suited to the soliders - if only there were some way of reducing the shine without ruining the figures.

Adding a splash of the water-based anti-shine that came with the Army Painter Mega Set on a previously spoilt Tyranid helped reduce the powdery frosted effect (but did re-introduce a bit of a sheen) so perhaps there's some hope...

The water-based anti-shine also helped restore a little bit of the Cadian Shock Trooper - though many of the details that the Quickshade picked out so well were lost, and large areas (like the helmet and shoulder pads) still had a nasty speckled effect all over them.

Before anti-shine, the details on the miniatures were picked out with sharp constrast but left a high-gloss finish on the miniatures

Anti-shine definitely takes the shine away - but sadly, also the colour vibrancy and model details!

I think I'm going to have to burn through a few more minis to get the combination of shade and anti-shine just right. Word has it that brush-on matt varnish works more consistently than spray. Hopefully this will work, as the original Quickshade had so much promise. I'd love to get back my initial enthusiasm for the Army Painter range!

Quickshade painting in double-quick time

The other day I took delivery of some Army Painter Quickshade Inks from Ian at www.ibuywargames.co.uk. He's already selling them at 10% less than RRP. With the 10% off voucher from a previous purchase the total cost was just over £11, including delivery!

It's not the cost that matters though, it's how they perform that we're interested in, so I set about trying the inks on a couple of (unfinished) models. I've been painting some soldiers to use in the up-and-coming publicity shots for a game we're working on called Starship Raiders. Originally I was going to use the Games Workshop Cadian Shock Troopers (who look more like "regular" soldiers, than their over-armoured Space Marines) but was advised against using too many GW miniatures in any promotional material. Apparently GW are a bit over-zealous in guarding their "intellectual property" so I'm now using non-branded minis, from a variety of sources.

To really try out these inks, I thought I'd have a go at painting a miniature as quickly as possible. After all, the product is called Quickshade. And the water-based inks means no hanging around for 48 hours waiting for varnish to dry, nor messing about with anti-shine matt varnish.

I took a plastic robot model (from e4m miniatures robot range) and base-coated it quickly with white primer (it was actually too late in the day to be spraying, so I painted the primer and based coat colour on with a brush, but then end result was still a totally white figure). Then I coated the whole thing in Quickshade Dark Tone.

The water-based inks leave a lot of pigment colour on the surface, not just in the creases. In the Army Painter painting guide, they even demonstrate that the ink is heavy heavily pigmented by painting an ork face green by simply applying green ink over a white base coat

Personally, I think the effect is rather impressive, left at that: if ever I had to paint an army of Orksies, I'd just ink them green, and pick out the details like eyes and teeth, and call it finished!

Because of the heavy colouring, our all-white robot quickly became a dull grey:

(this is how quickly I was trying to paint: I just kept hold of one leg of the model and splattered ink over the rest. I'll finish the other leg now the rest of the model has dried!)

The water-based Quickshade is obviously not shiny (like the varnish-based tin of gloop) but it's also not quite as brown, once dried (though the ink does look brown while being applied). This model had a really generous coat of ink.

Once dry, I picked out a few details (the bits on the shoulders, the little bits sticking out of the legs and the visor). Lastly I added a thin line of white back over some of the edges of the armour.

And that's it. Although it's not going to win any awards, I think the model is certainly well-painted enough to earn a place on the gaming board. And given this only took about an hour or so (and admittedly, I've not painted the arms yet) it's quite feasible to have a squad of ten or a dozen robots painted up over a wet weekend - now that the weather's turned, it might come round sooner rather than later.

Now it's time to finish the game board and try to actually play a game on it - with some nicely painted miniatures!