Tips for Starting Warhammer 40k: Painting Basics 3

Here are just a few more general painting tips, I won't list them in any particular order, and I will definitely add to this list in the future, and if I learn new things.

Paint Thinning

You NEED to thin your paints. The new GW line is supposed to be usable right out of the pot, but I don't agree. Most painters will agree that all paints need to be thinned. What they don't agree on is what to use to thin the paint. Some people use just plain water, while other use things like Future Floor Polish, and homemade concoctions with snake oil and such. For master painter, this might matter, but for beginner, just plain old water should work just fine. Ideally, it should be deionized/distilled water, as some of the added substances in tap water, like chlorine, iron, copper, etc. can affect the pigment in your paint. I haven't really had issues with tap water, but I have never used distilled water, so I can't really comment on that.

Also heavily debated is how much to thin paint. Ratios like 1:1 and 4:3 of water to paint are thrown around, but it really depends on the brand of paint and the application. Drybrushing doesn't usually need to be thinned, but base coats and layers do. Some people say that the paint should be the consistency of skim milk. I think that's a little too much thinning, and again it depends on the brand, color and application of the paint.

So, how much do you thin? Your goal is to find a sweet spot of good coverage with as few coats as possible, while not obscuring detail. As a rule, your paint should not leave streaks, and your base coat should be completely opaque in 2-3 coats. You really just need to practice thinning and eventually you will be able to eyeball a good paint consistency for optimal paint performance. 

Water Pots

As you are painting, you will need to regularly wash off your brush. Try to wash of the paint every 5 minutes or so, maybe even more often, even if you are using the same color again. This prevents paint from drying on the brush itself or at the base of the bristles (which is a guaranteed way to destroy a brush). 

Keeping two or three water pots at your paint station at once is recommended. One is for regular paints, the other for metallic paints, and possibly a third just for thinning paints (you can use a dropper bottle for thinning instead, so you can measure how much you use). Metallic paints contain flakes of aluminum, which make the paint sparkle, for lack of a better word. When you wash your brush with metallic paint into a water pot, the flakes come off with the paint, and can be transferred to other, non-metallic paints if you use the same water. This can lead to your regular colors "sparkling" like metallics, which can make your miniatures look kinda silly.

I try to change my pots every painting session, but sometimes I forget or I am lazy, and do it every 2 or 3 sessions. As long as your colors are not being influence by the water in the pots, you should be fine!

Tips for Starting Warhammer 40k: Painting Basics 2

So, you have your miniatures all assembled and primed. What to do next? Well, assuming you have some brushes, it's time to talk about paints.

Paints

Starting out buying paints can be a little overwhelming at first. There are so many brands (GW, Reaper, Vallejo, Army Painter) and hundred upon hundreds of colors. Where do you start?

There is no "best paint brand" out there. It really depends on what you're painting and also your own preferences. I mostly use GW (Games Workshop) paints, with a couple Vallejo Game Color and general craft paints mixed in. Many beginners enjoy GW paints because they are specifically tailored to painting citadel miniatures, so you need to do very minimal or no paint mixing, which can be extremely difficult for people just starting out. However, the new GW line has hundreds of colors, which total to about $450. For most of us this is not a realistic option.

Instead, a better option is to buy paints as you need them. This is sometimes more difficult, as won't have the colors you need right away. But when you are starting out, you should only need about 10 colors or so if you choose them well. As I stated in an earlier post, the GW starting paint set is great for this, although you may need to buy some additional colors.

If I were to recommend one paint brand over all others, it would be Vallejo (Game Color and Model Color are similar, I'm not 100% sure on the difference, but I prefer the former). They come in dropper bottles, which makes mixing paints easier (you can count the drops of each color used to recreate later) and they don't dry out. I don't think they have a starter paint set, so you should just buy the paints you really need.

When you have both your army and your color scheme chosen, you need to chose the paints you are going to use. Typically you will need a base color, a shade, a highlight, and a couple various other colors. For an example, I will chose the Dark Angels. Looking at the  Dark Angels color scheme, I can see that the colors are mostly dark green with some red parts as well. I chose a base of a pretty dark green (I used Caliban Green), a shade of Nuln Oil (a GW wash), a highlight of Moot Green mixed with a little bit of Caliban Green, and a few other colors, like Leadbelcher for the metal and Blood Red (now Evil Sunz Scarlet) for some other parts. I completed my entire model with just a few colors. You will need a few more colors to paint more complex models, but you can see the process here. The goal is to spend as little money on paints as possible, because the cost can really add up. 

---Games Workshop Paints---

Even after exploring all the other paint brands out there, many painters chose to use GW paints. There is nothing wrong with that, they are good paints. However, the new GW paint set  can be awfully deceiving. There are 144 paints, and many of them look nearly identical. Unless you have money coming out all bodily orifices, you can't afford to buy them all. Here are a few tips for the new GW paint line:

-   The "Basecoat" and "Layer" paints are almost identical in everything that counts. They can be used interchangeably. 

-    Instead of buying all 4 GW glazes, you can buy a "Glaze Medium", and make a glaze using any of your existing colors.

-    The GW washes are good. You should get at least the brown and black ones (Nuln Oil and Agrax Earthshade).Washes in general are almost a necessity in your painting arsenal (I will go over what they are, and how to use them, soon).

-     You don't have buy the whole range of one color ( i.e. all the shades of green, there are like 15 of them). You can buy the darkest and lightest of them and mix, like Moot Green and Caliban Green. I use those for just about all my greens, and I can add a little blue to make shades of turquoise.

-      The "Dry" paints can be avoided. They are meant for drybrushing, a technique I will go over soon. They are pretty much just lighter colors of some of the common layer paints. 

-      I haven't tried any of the Citadel "Texture" paints, nor have I heard bad or good things about them. I will do my research and get back to you.

Hopefully, with these tips, you can cut down your paint spending as much as possible. It's usually a good idea to know that you need a specific paint before going and buying it.

---Other Paint Brands---

There are lots of paint brands out there that I haven't tried. If you want to try a brand, don't be afraid. GW and Vallejo aren't necessarily the best, they just happen to be the ones I use and have access to. Sometimes, when you need a very large amount of some color, like for painting tanks, using a cheaper craft paint is the way to go. I usually don't like using certain craft paints, as mine sometimes don't thin well and leave streaks, but I'm sure others are good. Don't be afraid to branch out, but test them out on some practice miniatures first.


Overview: Buy the paints you know you will need. When in doubt, just buy Vallejo paints. I think they're awesome, and I don't even get paid to say that. You can always mix the paints you need using the ones you have, but if you are going to be using one A LOT, just buy that color. Make sure you have a basecoat color, a highlight and a shade color for you army (these are the ones you don't want to have to mix, because you don't want half your army to look one shade off from the other half). Test out paints from lots of brands of some test miniatures.

Tips for Starting Warhammer 40k: Painting Basics 1

Painting Basics

When you're first starting playing Warhammer 40,000 you need to paint your miniatures (that's a given). Most tournaments have rules about painted miniatures (i.e. you need at least a basecoat, or up to 5 colors, etc). Either way, it is always better, in my opinion, to have an army that is fully painted instead of one that is just grey (or primed black).

In this post, I'm going over some basic painting tools and tips. I am breaking this up into several posts so it can be more easily digested.

Paint Brushes

When you start out, you only need a few brushes. if you keep them well maintained. I use only round brushes (the ones of the left column of the picture). The one's that you really need are the following ---

-A large/basecoat brush (Size 3 or 4)
- A standard size brush (Size 1 or 2)
- A detail brush (Size 0 or 2/0)
- Any brush size 0-2, for glue/drybrushing/liquid green stuff (one you don't mind ruining)

Not every company uses this size system. Army Painter and Games Workshop use names, like "Detail" and "Standard/Character". As your painting needs get more complex, you might need some more brushes (like a 3/0 or 4/0 brush for fine detail, or a larger brush for tanks and such).

Brush Maintainence

When you are first starting out, you don't need to worry about any fancy brush cleaners or anything like that. Just follow a few simple rules and you should be fine:

1. Never store your brushes tip-down. Ever. You can store them on their sides, or tips up in a cup or mug.

2. Always clean the paint off your brush. As soon as you are done painting, clean off your brush thoroughly and never let paint dry on it. Also, letting paint get down towards the base of the brush (where all the bristles converge) is bad, so try to only load up paint on the tip of the brush.

3. Try to keep a good tip on all your brushes. A brush is basically useless once it can no longer keep a good tip. If the bristles no longer come to a point at the end, but instead fray in all different directions, the brush should no longer be used for painting, only things like glue and maybe mixing paint.

If you are careful with your brushes, they should last you a long time.

Priming

Every model should be primed (spray painted) before being painted. This allows the paint to stick to the model better, and results in a better overall paint job. Usually, this is done with either black or white, but can be done in other colors (maybe a metal color for Necrons, or a blue for Ultramarines. This can be done with a spray gun, which I will go over much later). Additional coats of paint go on top of this. 

The choice of a white or black priming depends on the color scheme of your model. It's pretty simple: If you have mostly light colors, prime using white. If you use mostly dark colors, use a black primer. It's hard to make light colors cover a dark primer (painting white or yellow over black is very difficult). 

I will go over priming technique, as well as some things to look out for while priming, in a later post.

This has been a very brief introduction to painting, more to follow! Be sure to comment if you found this helpful or have any questions!