# How to Paint Minis the Bruce Campbell Way*



## tallyrand (Jun 12, 2009)

*this thread not affiliated with Bruce Campbell

But seriously, who wants to know how to paint the Tallyrand way, and on top of that, I don't just want this to be just "my" thread. I'm hoping to learn some stuff here too.

It saddens me to see mini painting being relegated to the sidelines of the hobby, and I hope for this thread to become a clearinghouse for anyone keeping the flame alive, be you neophyte or master brushman.


Let me start with my own personal Rule #1:

Rule #1 of painting Miniatures: There is no such thing as cheating. 
I repeat, when it comes to painting miniatures: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS CHEATING! When I paint, I use a magnifying visor, two lamps using both an incandescent and "natural light" and super microfine ink pens to do such things as add tattoos, designs, and general blacklining.

I hope in the coming days to cover a number of topics, with lots of pictures and so on, feel free to chime in, I may even take requests.

Topics on deck:

Paints and inks- the good, the bad, and the ugly

Minis - pewter to plastics, prepping and priming

Brushes - care and feeding, what to get, how much to pay, and brush modding

Bases - simple black, or scenic

Online resources - sages and gods of the brush

Heck, we may even get around to how to actually paint!

Edit: I'm mostly covering subjects at they randomly pop into my head, if you have a topic you wish me to blather on ablut, please pipe up, and let me know, and I'll blather at it to the best of my ability.


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## El Mahdi (Jun 12, 2009)

Awesome thread idea.  I'll be following it, and hopefully maybe even have something to contribute.  I've already subscribed to it so I can keep up with it.

It does seem that with the advent of pre-painted minis and easily printed figure counters, less and less people paint their own minis as part of the gaming experience.  That's too bad.  That was always an integral part of the game for me since I first started playing.  In my games I require everyone to have their own mini of their character, whether self painted or not.  But, when someone paints their own, or even goes as far as to modify it to be specific to their character, I feel it adds a lot to the game.

Perhaps you (or others, including me) could also contribute ideas on modifiying minis.

I'll be anticipating your first installment.

See you around.


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## tallyrand (Jun 12, 2009)

So just who is this Tallyrand guy, and why should we listen to him? What does he know?

Well, I've been painting minis for about 20 years, and I love it.  I started painting right as I started gaming, and they have always gone together for me. Even when I wasn't gaming, I was still painting minis.

Here's a couple pix  shared oven in Chronoplasm's "My First Minis!" post. the first here is the second miniature i ever painted, the first one did not belong to me, a friend lent it to me, so i could try out painting them for myself.  I painted this guy pretty much from my list of things not to do.  He was unprimed, painted with Testor's high gloss enamel model paints using a plastic bristled brush.









That being said, here are a batch of those that I have painted over the last year.  these are mostly all Player Character minis that my group uses for D&D.  My DM pretty much hung up his brushes when pre painted minis became available, and he probably has a collection to rival anyone, so He provides the bad guys that we only have to look at until we kill them, and I provide the ones for the characters.






A bit of improvement after 20 years.

These are about a 7-8 on my personal 1-10 scale, after this point, I kind of start running into a problem with diminishing returns, where the painting time nearly doubles for each additional notch on the scale I want to bump it up.  

Even after this time, I am still working on ways to improve my painting game, right now I am working with both hand painted detail, and non metalic metals, and I am slowly getting better with both.


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## jaerdaph (Jun 13, 2009)

Best. Mini. Painting. Thread. Title. EVAR!


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## tallyrand (Jun 13, 2009)

MY GREATEST SECRET:

It's all in the prep work... seriously.

Trim and File:

Yes, clip and trim the mold lines, that's importiant, get yourself a nice set of mini files, I usually pick mine up from some wierdo at the flea market. Also a pair of flat edge model clippers, I have a old set of the Games Workshop ones and they are pretty nice, but they have some new ones, that I may have to pick up. A good exacto knife is nice to have (for those of you allowed sharp objects) Watch that mold line, follow it all the way around the mini. 

Once the mini is trmmed and before you prime it, wash it. You've been fondling it wit your greasy mits, and its also got some mold release agent still on it, warm water and a little dish soap usually do the trick, make sure you work over a bowl or collinder, or at least have the strainer in the sink, you don't want to drop your guy down the drain.

Priming:

There are two major schools of thought when it comes to priming miniatures. Black Prime, and White Prime.

White Priming your minis will absolutely make your colors pop, but it can be pretty unforgiving, and getting your brush down into all the little white nooks and crannies can be tough, but if you fail to do so, it is obvious to even the casual observer.

Black Prime does not have this problem, but you have to slather on a several layers of paint to get your colors to really show, and this can eventually hide detail, and even then, your colors can come out muddy and dark.

Grey Prime has neither of the advantages of the Black or White Prime, and the drawbacks of both, and is an abomination before gods and men.

Optimus Prime is the leader of the Autobots.

When priming, the major environmental factor to watch out for is the humidity, this isin't an issue for some, but for those of us that live down in South Florida, it can be an issue. Priming in high humidity can cause your paint to kind of pebble up, a mistake I still make to this day, usually because I am too impatient to get painting.

Now *here is the secret*, here is how to get the best of both worlds of prime, and more when it comes to prepping your minis: the Greybrush.

You start with a nice flat black prime, easy enough, now after that, I get my black paint, I keep one of my black paint pots kind of watered down just for this, and go over the mini again, getting the paint in all the tiny nooks and crannies that the prime may have missed. 

After that, you do a nice heavy drybrush of the whole figure with a medium to light grey, and follow up with a medium to light drybrush of a nice crisp white. 

It's not until this point that I consider a mini ready to start painting. You have the black, down in the deep recesses of the figure, and the progression of black to white on all the detail, this can even bring out hidden detail on the mini that you may have not been aware of before.

When done, they should look something like this:






Or this:






As you can see, I tend to do this in bulk. And I work on several at the same time, giving me somthing to do while the pant dries on another.

Here's some half painted ones:







There are some neat tricks you can do with this technique that I will get into later.

Tallyrand


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## Cwheeler (Jun 14, 2009)

I haven't painted any minis for years, but I must admit that this thread has piqued my interest again. I shall be following!


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## tallyrand (Jun 14, 2009)

I like to think that I am a good mini painter, somewhere in the top 90% of all serious mini painters, I have won a silver in a Games Workshop Golden Demon contest, and was published in White Dwarf magazine.  (the guy that won absolutely smoked me too, tons of hand sculpted detail, it was outrageous)

That said, I want to introduce you to who I consider to be probably the best mini painter in the world: Jen Haley

Paintrix Miniatures, online portfolio of Jen Haley

She consistently stuns me with beautifully blended colors, and by just cramming detail into her works. I am both humbled and inspired every time I look at her minis.


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## tallyrand (Jun 14, 2009)

PAINTING FROM THE INSIDE OUT

If you scroll up to the last pic above this post you can see kinda what I am talking about here.

When painting a mini, the painting order for me is usually as if they are getting dressed.  

Skin first, then shirt and pants, armor, then cloaks, then belts, straps, pouches and buckles, and finally weapons and hair.

It is easier to work this way, and tends to lead to fewer mistakes on my part. 

I tend to save weapons and hair until last because this leaves me a couple safe places to handle the miini without worry of mussing my work.  See the warrior in the blue on the right there above,  she's just about done, with hair and weapon still left.  I have seen others recommend attaching the base of the mini to something to grip. like a large cork or some such with blu-tac, and that works for them, and may benefit you.

If you look up, you can see the executioner there on the left, the flesh is painted, and I have started on his clothes, painting them black.  this means, that if I was a bit sloppy with the drybrush on the flesh, that overflow into the unpainted areas got covered when I started on the next layer up.

While my drybrush is much more controlled these days, this technique really helped me when I started out, and I still use it, it letting me instinctively plan the order in which I will paint the fig.

EDIT: that reminds me, before you start painting, wash your hands! You don't know where they've been, and you don't want the grubb form your grubby mitts to get all over your awesome mini.


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## tallyrand (Jun 15, 2009)

BRACE YOURSELF

Alright, you have your paints all laid out, your brushes soldier upped in a nice neat row, fresh brushwater, a clean mat of paper towels, a brand spanking new primed and prepped mini, sitting there, as full of potential as a five year old with a tool box. 

What’s the problem? 

Your hands are shaking like a lab monkey on his 10th bottle of Mountain Dew.

Your paint is ending up everywhere but where you want it, that white for the eye has just become a cheek highlight, and the buckle on the baldric has become silver smear down the front of the jerkin. (someone remind me to talk about cleaning up messes later)

What you need is power… Pyramid Power! Pyramids do more than tell us what to eat, keep our undead secure, and our razors sharp, they keep our hands steady too!

When painting you want to use your arms and hands to form a stable triangle with your brush and mini as the apex. 
-Your forearms, braced just past the elbow against the edge of the table. 
-Your non painting hand holding the mini, usually top and bottom (this is another reason that I paint the hair last, and don’t use some kind of grip/base on the mini)
-Painting hand, with the brush held, nice and close to the bristles between thumb and your first finger, you place the 2nd and 3rd fingers of your brush hand along the 1st finger of your mini hand.

This gives you both a stable platform to work from, and still leaves you with a good range of motion for the brush. The only drawback, is it’s kinda hard to look too close at the mini while doing this without hunching, my solution for this is to either use a lower than normal seat while painting, or a higher than normal work area. Personally I just adjust my chair as low as it goes.


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## carborundum (Jun 15, 2009)

Awesome thread - and you sure can paint! You're also considerably better than the bottom 10% if you ask me 
The greybrush technique is genius! Can't wait to see if you can explain blending and that whole backwards fake metallic technique. That's never worked for me yet 

I'm getting back into painting again since the plastic minis get steadily worse and the summer holidays approach (I teach). I'll check back regular like. Cheers!


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## tallyrand (Jun 16, 2009)

Thraug had some questions in another thread about getting started, here's what I had to say, these are some real basics concepts, but true none the less, and if you never painted before, you may not know.

________________________________________________

Almost all miniature paints are water based acrylics, the paints usually I work with are Games Workshop:

http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/ca...e=paints-tools

They have a Starter paint Set for about $30 which is kinda the Crayola basic 8 of painting, they also have a Hobby Starter Set for $50 which comes with a brush, clippers and some glue, and is a bit of a rip off in my book. They used to sell a massive paint set with all of their colors for about $150 which was actually a pretty good value. 

I began painting minis with Partha Paints, but they don't make those any more, but most of mine are still good, even after all these years.

Most "miniature paints" ARE superior to what you will find on the shelves of the arts and crafts store, and you will pay for that, they are typically much smoother, have more pigment, and take to the mini much better than crafts paint. They also will cost you at least 2-3x as much. if you are just starting out, and on a budget, try the cheaper option just to get your feet wet.

For priming, yes, you use spray paint, while most mini paint companies have their own brand of Miniature primer, here you can skimp without noticeable effect. Usually you won't find "Black Primer" in most spray paint displays, it's pretty much white and rusty brown, what you are looking for is flat or ultra flat black. This will do the trick, remember that multiple light coats are preferable to one heavy coat, and watch out for the humidity, wait until it is nice and dry outside, high humidity can cause a rough pebbled finish that you don't want.

For brushes, again, this comes down again to price, for a really nice single fine tipped brush, you can expect to pay $5-10, but, for that same $5, you can go to the Wal-Mart crafts section and get a variety pack of brushes which will work just fine. You are looking for natural fibers, short, fine tips for detail work, as well as some flat brushes for broader areas and drybrushing. I've been painting for a long time, and have tons of brushes, but I still picked up a couple of these multi packs just last week. 

Other basics are a roll of paper towels, I always paint over a pad of paper towels about 4 layers thick, it gives me something to remove excess paint from my brush on, a place to dry my brushes after cleaning them, as well as a cushion for when I inevitably drop the mini I am working on. 

You also need at least 2 cups of brush water that you are willing to sacrifice to the cause, I use disposable red party cups. Why at least 2? One is for the basic cleaning of the paint covered brush, and it gets dirty pretty fast, the second one is for a second rinsing of the brush before drying it on the paper towel. Also if you are working with Metallic Paints you want a separate cup for that so the tiny flecks don't contaminate your other waters and transfer.


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## tallyrand (Jun 16, 2009)

THE SETUP

I realize that I am a bit more into painting minis than your average bear, I realized this when all my painting supplies stopped being able to be transported in one trip to the car, I used to have a nice painting box, that held about 30 paints and a nice selection of brushes, and I could go to my FLGS and paint there.   About 8 years ago, I bought a desk at Big Lots just for painting.  






So, there you see, paints, brushes, brushwater, magnifying visor, a couple ink pens, half painted minis, 2 lamps, some 2 part greenstuff I just picked up, the pliers on the left hand side are there because the old GW paintpots are less than cooperative when it comes to opening once paint dries in the grooves of the caps. All parked in front of a nice source of natural light.  

ENHANCE!






These brushes are what I talked about above, this is two multi packs (about $10) worth of brushes from Wal-mart.


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## ExploderWizard (Jun 17, 2009)

Great thread!

I gamed for quite a while before getting and painting my first minis about 21 years ago. I am currently in the process of moving to a house that will have loads of work space but for the moment my paint stuff is packed carefully away. I shall enjoy following this thread to help with my mini painting fix until I can pick up the brush again.

IN DEFENSE OF CHEAP BRUSHES

I have my good sable brushes and really appreciate thier value but cheap brushes are great workhorses for painting bases, scenery and other workaday slop jobs that I wouldn't want my W&N series 7's to touch with a 10' pole. The really cheap ones are my go-to tacky glue applicators. 

I also like to keep a few larger cheap brushes around to use as dry  "dusters" to sweep off excess modeling sand or turf. 

For general use, I use a mid-grade cheap brush to do basecoating on rank and file plastic minis and save the good brushes for the detail.


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## pogre (Jun 18, 2009)

Here are some links to painter sites:
Painting Miniatures Guide

I've slowed down on painting and I am working more on Hirst Arts projects. Right now I cannot get on my website server, but I will put up a bunch of pictures of terrain in the not too distant future.

A silver in a GW contest is awesome. I've made final cut a few times, but never earned a demon. I stopped painting "competitively" a few years ago and now just paint when I feel like it. I'm in agreement with you about time versus results. I also prep my figures exactly the same way you described.


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## tallyrand (Jun 19, 2009)

THE RULE OF THE BRUSHES

I for one, welcome our new Brush Overlords.

This is the Rule of the Brushes: 

Thou Shalt Not Leave Thine Brushes Sitting in the Water.


Let it be graven into the very stone, and let that stone be used to bonk upon the head any who should defy its ordinance.


This is a bad thing for oh, so many reasons.

1. It will bend the tips of your fine tipped brushes. You know, the nice Windsor & Newton 10/0 that you just shelled out $10 for.
2. It will weaken the glue holding the bristles in the brush.
3. It will cause the wood of the brush handle to swell causing the paint on the handle to chip off.
4. It will cause the metal cap bit that holds the bristles to the handle to come loose.

In other words:

LEAVING YOUR BRUSHES SITTING IN THE WATER WILL DESTROY THEM!


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## carborundum (Jun 20, 2009)

Dear Mr. Tallyrand esq,

One is curious as to the manner of tricks one can perform upon one's greybrushed miniatures, as alluded to in a previous missive. A hint, pray, good sir? A simple hint to set the old brainstem to cogitating?

In anticipation of a favourable response,

Carb O Rundum Esq.


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## tallyrand (Jun 20, 2009)

LORD TARZAN OF GREYBRUSH

One of the neat things about the Greybrush, is how well it works with thin paints and washes.  Mmost of the heavy lifting has been done, and you don't have to spend a ton of time building up layers to get shading and highlights .  In the several posts above picture of half painted minis, check out the guy in the center with the green cape.  His boots and satchel are straight Citadel Chestnut ink applied to the Greybrushed mini.  This can produce a pretty rich effect for both leathers and wood.

Here are some Eunuchs, repurposed Dreamblade minis done to a quick battlefield mook standard:






Each of them except the yellow is just straight ink over the Greybrush on their pants (yes, they are kinda grainy, I primed with the humidity too high) the yellow I had to hit with a bit of paint on the highlights to bring it out just a bit more.  

This is great for painting armies, for my orcs, gobbos, and ogres I mixed up some custom flesh tones, between those and inking the clothes, leather and such, I only had to really "paint" the metal, teeth and other minor details on the rank and file types.  
















That's one of the things I really like about the Greybrush.  As you can see with the orcs, the colors are not as vivid as they would be if you had painted them all by hand, but you can get to a pretty quick battlefield standard by doing so.


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## RangerWickett (Jun 21, 2009)

For those unfamiliar, I think the thread title is a reference to this book, which is awesome, much as this thread is, and costs only $17 at Amazon, much as this thread does not.

[ame=http://www.amazon.com/Make-Love-Bruce-Campbell-Way/dp/0312312601]Amazon.com: Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way: Bruce Campbell: Books[/ame]


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## tallyrand (Jun 21, 2009)

The Man...The Chin...THE LEGEND


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## Olaf the Stout (Jun 25, 2009)

Very nice thread tallyrand.  I prime in white personally but I can see the time you would save by priming in black and then "greybrushing" they way you have.  I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this thread.

Olaf the Stout


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## chronoplasm (Jun 25, 2009)

I gave that greybrushing technique on some minis recently and it's worked wonders!
As soon as my camera is working (or I get a new camera) I'll have to show 'em off for critique.


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## Ktulu (Jun 26, 2009)

I've always primed with white in the past, and can testify to the irritation on missing little spots (that stuck out like a sore thumb).

I will begin this _greybrushing_ tonight!  Got a box o pewters to test it out on, anyway.  

Awesome thread, BTW.  Your skill trumps mine (I've painted the same elf wizard as your second image... let's just say mine's not ending up online for comparison )


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## Orius (Jun 26, 2009)

tallyrand said:


> the first here is the second miniature i ever painted, the first one did not belong to me, a friend lent it to me, so i could try out painting them for myself.  I painted this guy pretty much from my list of things not to do.  He was unprimed, painted with Testor's high gloss enamel model paints using a plastic bristled brush.




Not too bad for a first try though.  I started out by painting my HeroQuest minis, and I made the mistake of using Testor's on bare plastic too.  Some of those don't look too bad, but they're not great.  I got better after reading a Dragon article on painting that introduced me to acryllics, priming, and drybrushing.  So after reading that, I picked up three sets of acryllic paint that was made by Testors, there was a basic primary color set, an auto detailing set, and a set for model ariplanes and stuff that had stuff like olive drab, gray, and tan.  Those paints worked better, but some were glossy and looked like crap if used wrong.  The flat paint was better and looked pretty good, and I eventually added a few other colors I needed.  My palette was somewhat limited, but I'm ok at mixing colors if I need them. I haven't used them in a while though, so I imagine most of them have probably dried out.  I might be able to revive some of them with some water, another one of the  pluses to acryllic. The brushes were mostly cheap crappy brushes, but I added a few better brushes for detail work, and I still use the crap brushes for stuff like priming or inking where I'm more interested in covering as much of the mini as possible.



> Now *here is the secret*, here is how to get the best of both worlds of prime, and more when it comes to prepping your minis: the Greybrush.




Interesting.  I usually start with a flat white prime, do a base coat, ink it with watered down flat black, drybrush the whole thing with white, then drybrush the rest of the colors.  I'll have to try that method, looks like it can save some time.



> Here's some half painted ones:




That's pretty good.  Most of my best figures look a bit like that, though complete of course.  I'm not really interested in doing award winning work on the minis, but I also don't want them to look like crap, and I have a decent eye for detail.  Most of my minis are closer to your battlefield standard though, I'm generally more careful with unique PC-type minis



> EDIT: that reminds me, before you start painting, wash your hands! You don't know where they've been, and you don't want the grubb form your grubby mitts to get all over your awesome mini.




That always helps.  I wash my hands a lot when I'm working on game stuff, because I don't like stuff like Cheeto dust getting on my campaign notes.  I like to write my stuff up by hand.  The same thing goes for minis, dirt, oil, sweat and all kinds of crap can mess up a paint job.



> the pliers on the left hand side are there because the old GW paintpots are less than cooperative when it comes to opening once paint dries in the grooves of the caps.




I've been there.  I learned the hard way to be careful with the pliers too, because too much pressure can crush in part of the lid, and then it builds up rust which contaminates the paint.  When a lid is stuck, I usually dip on of the junk brushes in my wash solution, and rub it around the inside of the lid to soften it up a bit first.  If the dried paint isn't too bad, sometimes that even does the trick.




> You also need at least 2 cups of brush water that you are willing to sacrifice to the cause, I use disposable red party cups.




I use water with a little bit of alcohol and soap added to help clean up the brush.



tallyrand said:


> Thou Shalt Not Leave Thine Brushes Sitting in the Water.




I don't even let go of the brushes when I'm cleaning them off and let the tips touch the bottom of the cup for that reason.  I just swirl the brush around real good, wipe it off on a paper towel and repeat until there's not color left.  Then I dry the brush off really good, because the excess water will thin the paint out and weaken the coverage.

If I had a working digital camera, I'd probably share some of my better paint jobs in this thread.


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## Ktulu (Jun 29, 2009)

I tried out the black/greybrushing this weekend with some solid results!

As soon as I get some batteries in my camera I'll post some pics.  The black really darkened up the minis quite nicely; I often felt the white basecoat left a "bright sheen" making the mini seem to have no depth.

My skill is still amature at best, but these techniques did seem to help quite a bit!  Thanks!


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## Tamlyn (Jul 30, 2009)

Where did this thread go? I was really enjoying it and the timing couldn't have been better. I'm trying to build up a ton of mini's for my new campaign and was interested in trying these methods.


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## tallyrand (Aug 6, 2009)

What with one thing or another, I've been letting things slack off here. I have a batch of re-painted-pre-painted plastic minis that I'll put up in the next couple of days.

I have yet to find a way to successfully strip these things, so they are all primed over the origional paint job.

Currently I'm working on a technique for enhancing a pre-painted palstic mini without doing a full re paint, certainly this is a focus on speed over quality, but I have had a couple of interestig results.

I was reading over on the Reaper boards, and believe me, some of those guys are hard core, and a couple things they do is wet blending, and use really thin paints with all kinds of flow extenders and such added that they say it can take hours or even days for the paint to dry. One solution they have to this, in order to protect the model, is they will hit the mini with a matte sealer between their different painting stages.  

This got me thinking, one of the things that make me cringe is hearing some people saying that you can just paint straight on the pre-painted plastic, this works about as well as nailing Jell-O to the wall, but it got me thinking, what if I just hit the Pre-painted mini with a matte sealer, and paint over that, the sealer giving the paint something to "grip" onto, and from there, just add highlights or minor color changes and such, use some inks to add depth and so on.

The other reason I am kinda excited about this idea, is that it preserves the one thing that I think the pre-painted plastics actually bring to the table, which is the clear/translucent effects that are impossible with metal minis, or are lost by simply priming over the plastic, I had previously considered trying to preserve these effects by covering them with rubber cement before priming, but I think this will work better.  

I'll have some pics up in the next couple of days...pinky schwear!


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## pogre (Aug 6, 2009)

When I hit some of the WOTC figures with matte spray to do as you suggested it clouded some of the transparent bits. You might want to mask them before spraying. Good luck!


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## tallyrand (Aug 7, 2009)

I'm hoping to reverse the clouding issue by either using a gloss sealer over it, or a brush on gloss varnish once the mini is done. 

When I'm getting really nutty over a mini, I'll use paint on gloss varnish over the final matte sealer on things like gems, lips and eyes to bring out their luster again.


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## El Mahdi (Aug 7, 2009)

The problem I've found when re-painting D&D pre-painted minis, is that even one or two layers of paint (or sealer) raises the surface enough that you start to lose the definition from features.  Especially facial features.  Faces on the pre-painted minis are one of the parts that needs the most work (very little shaping and highlighting in WotC painting, and many times the eyes aren't even painted where they are supposed to be). Even one layer of paint on the face, in order to repaint the features properly, raises the surface enough that it's extremely hard to find where the eyes go again.

How do you put the paint or sealer on thin enough to serve your purposes, but not thick enough to ruin definition of features?


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## tallyrand (Aug 7, 2009)

The best I can recommend is a light prime, and thin paints

In my case, mini snob that I am, Most of the pre-painted plastics that I work on are monsters/creatures who usually have more sharply incised features.  Most of my PC types are metal. However I did work on a tiefling mini for one of the players in my group, and the thing's face was a train wreck.  About the best you can hope for is to use colors with greater contrast than you would normally use to give the illusion of greater depth, and it may even have to descend into the realms of freehand work for more details, like lips and eyebrows and so on.

Most of it boils down to the simple mantra "You can't polish a turd."


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## Shape D. (Aug 12, 2009)

Fantastic idea on the Graybrushing to start the mini. Haven't tried it with an entire mini before, but usually anything I've painted the dreaded color red I paint black and white, and use the red basically as a wash. 

I had given up using black primer due to the lack of 'zing' you get when using a white primer, but I'll have to give this a try. Especially on those chainmail wearing mini's that don't always get the deep recesses painted when inking over them.


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## Xyxox (Sep 5, 2009)

I'm on the verge of buying an airbrush and compressor as I have a couple dozen tanks to paint for Warhammer 40K.

My question is, has anybody tried using Gesso to prime minis? I've seen some posts on the internet and have been considering it. Gesso has teeth for binding paint to the surface and can be used on a wide variety of surfaces. I'm thinking of going with Golden Black Gesso as I love Golden's acrylics in 2 and 4 oz. squeeze bottles (Better than Vallejo paints, IMO, and maybe a bit cheaper in most colors).

If this works out for me, I'll never buy a spray can of primer again.


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## carborundum (Mar 10, 2010)

Can we have more?


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## El Mahdi (Mar 10, 2010)

deleted


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## dvvega (Jul 1, 2010)

Your greybrush technique is very well explained. What do you think of a flat white prime (*GASP*) but then followed up by a black or brown wash? It seems to achieve similar results to what you have described.

D


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## Holy Bovine (Jul 8, 2010)

Deserving of a big bump.  Hopefully tallyrand sees this thread and posts more awesome pics and advice.  I am getting back into mini painting after a long absence and these tips and techniques are going to help a lot.


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## pdmiller (Aug 4, 2010)

*What about horses?*

I've had some success with the rich red-brown type hide for horses, and even a centaur.  Now for some inexplicable reason I've decided to paint a horse dapple-grey.  I must have been insane.

Desperately seeking tips for this project, initial efforts have been disheartening..


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## AJCarrington (Aug 4, 2010)

There is a pretty good article about painting horses over on Brushthralls.  I believe that one of the examples is a grey horse.  There is another good one over at Chest of Colors, though the final coloring may be darker than your looking for.

Regards,

AJC


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## Ulrick (Aug 9, 2012)

I'm going to try greybrushing, since my miniatures, when completely painted, always seem so dark since I only use black primer.


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## JoeGKushner (Aug 12, 2012)

Xyxox said:


> I'm on the verge of buying an airbrush and compressor as I have a couple dozen tanks to paint for Warhammer 40K.
> 
> My question is, has anybody tried using Gesso to prime minis? I've seen some posts on the internet and have been considering it. Gesso has teeth for binding paint to the surface and can be used on a wide variety of surfaces. I'm thinking of going with Golden Black Gesso as I love Golden's acrylics in 2 and 4 oz. squeeze bottles (Better than Vallejo paints, IMO, and maybe a bit cheaper in most colors).
> 
> If this works out for me, I'll never buy a spray can of primer again.




Gesso priming

pros and cons over there.

I dig my airbrush. Badger 105 for the 'thick' paint and a renegade for some of the airbrush ready stuff.


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## JoeGKushner (Aug 12, 2012)

In terms of greybrushing, Privater Press has been talking about underprimming for a while.

Hitting a model with different colors of spray primer from higher and higher angles.

Works out pretty well, especially on the larger figures that can take it. Gives some quick highlighting and shading. 

I use the various different colors of primer from Vallejo and the Army Painter for that aspect. Good stuff.


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