After an early afternoon break for some Attack Wing - including getting an opponent into a rather awkward spot:
I returned and washed most of the figures that I had primed (no pics of them today - I'm not going to bombard you with pictures where you can hardly tell what you are looking at). I did get some work done on the figure:
And have also started working on the base for another figure (slung low to the ground, so it would be difficult to do everything with it glued on):
I'm going to paint the flat areas with the Citadel Agareth Earth technical paint (which, when slopped on gives a very nice cracked earth effect) and scatter the grass around where the wheels on the figure that will sit upon it will not be. This should give a nice variety of colors and textures to the base, and make the piece come even more alive.
Finally, as promised, I'm going to talk to you about painting techniques. We'll start with the first one that I learned, and one that is a mainstay of my painting technique, even today (as you could see from my Mousling yesterday): Drybrushing.
Drybrushing is a very handy technique to know and to start out with, as it, quite literally, lets the miniature paint itself. You'll need three similar colors that become lighter (another staple of my painting techniques), a largish miniatures brush that you don't mind wearing out, and a paper towel to wipe off the excess paint.
The technique is rather straightforward - you'll start with a base coat using the darkest color, making certain to fill in the area you're working in. Once you have that area filled in evenly, you'll dip your brush in the second paint color, the wipe the brush quickly on the paper towel 5 or 6 times, followed by lightly swiping the tip of the brush over the area you're drybrushing several dozen times. The third layer will use a similar process, but you'll use about a dozen swipes across the paper towel to start, though you'll still brush along the painting area several dozen times.
The more times that you swipe the brush across the surface, the better the effect will look, and the more smoothly the colors will blend together. This technique is particularly useful for Fur, Ground, Wrinkled Cloth, or other low-surface area and high-detail areas. This technique is particularly bad for large, flat areas that don't have much detail to them (as they will still look large and flat, and horribly painted).
That will wrap up the update today. I won't have much time to work on figures tomorrow, so I'll give you all a discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of the different primer colors, when you'll want to use each, and the technique that I personally use for priming my figures (it's a tad bit complicated and much more expensive, but you've all seen the results it gets!).
Until then, paint on!
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