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Minifigs Painting Tips*Transcribed by George Arnold * Reproduced from a 1980s newsletter by Introduction - The Lifelike Effect Suppose you want to paint a figure in a blue coat. You can simply select an appropriate blue, cover the coat with paint and leave it at that. However, if your figure were life-size, he would not look very realistic. Real blue coats appear to the human eye to be made up of differing hues of blue. Cloth creases and folds. Thus, some of the material is recessed and shaded from the sunlight while other parts are raised to the light. The recessed parts will appear a darker shade of blue or even black; the raised parts will appear a lighter blue or even white. Color changes its shade to the human eye, according to how exposed it is to direct light. The 15mm and 25mm figure is simply too small for this contrasting light-and-dark effect to be readily apparent to the human eye. Simulating it with different shades of paint is necessary, and requires that the contrast be exaggerated so the eye can readily discern it. Fortunately, simulating the contrast of light and dark requires only learning some tricks. No increase in your basic painting skill whatsoever is required. The tricks are easy to learn, speed rather than slow painting time per figure as the tricks are most efficiently used when painting a bunch of figures at the same time, and are bound to increase your painting enjoyment as they open a whole new world of vivid color contrasts. Take the small amount of time involved to learn them and you will soon be amazed at the quantum jump in life-like appearance of your figures. We are going to take advantage of the three-dimensional nature of our figures, e.g., that they own both recessed and raised areas on their surfaces. We are also going to take advantage of the fact the thinner paint is mixed, the poorer it covers. We will use techniques called dry-brushing, washing and staining, all of which will soon become very familiar. But first, let's start at the beginning with preparing our figures for painting. Cleaning Your Figures Figures are cast in two-piece rubber molds, which are held together by air pressure that may not exceed a certain psi without flattening your figures. Thus, a thin metal film called "flash" will sometimes form along mold-parting lines and needs to be removed with a hobby knife. Don't cut into the figure. Rather, use the blade's side to knock off the excess metal ("deburring"). Sometimes, figures will have "pouring sprues." These are not meant to be part of the model but rather a chain connecting part of the model to the base to assist in casting. (Saber scabbards often have such a sprue connecting them to the base.) Sprues should be cut or clipped off. To insure that the bottom of the base is smooth, a couple of passes with a No. 5 wood file (not a metal file) cleans quickly without fouling its teeth with shavings. Mounting Figures for Priming/Painting If you are going to be turning out a number of figures, mounting them on painting sticks can greatly increase painting speed. These are just wood strips, e.g., pine lattice from the lumber yard. Figures should be mounted far enough apart (one and a half inches or so) so that you can easily manipulate a brush around them. For foot, simply put drops of white glue at the proper intervals, put the figures on the drops and let dry. Incidentally, use very little glue. More just makes it harder to pop a finished figure off. We use a very small screwdriver for popping finished figures. Cavalry can best be attached by leaving any identification tag on the figure and gluing it to the stick. The figure is off the edge of the stick and resting on another stick while the identification tag dries. Painting sticks can be any length you want but keep in mind that you will sometimes be holding a stick in the air with one hand and painting with the other. More than two feet long is unwieldy. Of course, there's no limit to the number of painting sticks used. If you are only painting a couple of figures and a painting stick isn't warranted, a clothes pin of the type with a spring will work well for holding 25mm figures. Small alligator clips will do the job for 15mm. Priming Your Figures Priming figures before painting is really a must. Primers are designed to cling to surfaces like metal much more tenaciously than paint and in turn create a surface to which the paint will adhere well. Spray primers are by far the fastest way to accomplish this boring task and will do the job just as well as brush-on primers provided you follow the directions on the can (hold the can at the proper distance from the figure). Our primers are bought at the hardware store and are cheap for a 12.4-ounce can. We use either black or white primer, as will be covered later. They are:
Most hardware stores carry this brand although a comparable brand like Rust-oleum should do an equally good job. We also use another primer when we're painting only a few figures and don't want to bother spraying. This is Gesso, available from any art supply store. Artists use it to prime their canvasses. It thins with water and is an excellent primer. One jar will last for years. If it bubbles when you use it, you've made it too watery and should add more Gesso. It dries quick, which can be a time-saver, and in a pinch will pass as white paint. As it is white, if you have elected the black-prime method you will have to paint a figure black after gessoing. More about priming later. A Little Bit About Paint The techniques of dry-brushing, washing and staining we'll be discussing are designed to be used with water-based paints (acrylics). We feel these are greatly superior to enamels for the average painter. First, they are far more elastic than enamels and less likely to chip or crack if a figure is bent. They don't wear as easily with handling. They dry much faster. Clean-up is much easier. All the thinner you need is as close as your water tap. Finally, brushes cost money and water-based paints extend brush life. We recommend Armory brand paints. This doesn't mean there aren't other good water-based paints available. However, the Armory paints tend to be a little thicker in the bottle than the other brands we've sampled, which is a definite advantage in the technique of dry-brushing. A Little Terminology Stain: Paint is diluted with enough water to make it flow easily without losing too much opacity or covering power. Try one part paint to an equal amount of water and adjust as required. We could use full strength paint for the stain step instead of diluting. We make a stain as a matter of speeding up our application of paint as stain will flow easier. However, if it is not covering well, we've made the stain too thin and must add more paint. Wash: More water is added than with a stain. The color becomes quite runny and will not cover well on a flat surface. One part paint to three parts water should be about right. Dry-Brush: No water is added to the paint. A brush is loaded with paint and worked on a piece of newspaper or paper towel until it appears the brush is dry. If the brush is then run across an uneven surface, such as a figure, little flecks of color will adhere only to the raised sections of the figure. Contrasting Light and Dark: The Method Let's assume you are going to paint up a unit of ancient Persian Immortals and you've decided that they should have yellow robes. We will also assume for the moment that you have mounted them on a painting stick and spray primed them white. You select a medium yellow and make a stain. By the way, an inexpensive tray with shallow bowls, available at the art supply store, is perfect to make stains and washes in. You now slop the yellow stain over your figures. Make sure that all of the robe is covered, but don't worry if other parts of the figure are stained. You'll be painting over those parts later anyway and you are trying to go as quickly as possible. As soon as the figures dry, you are ready for the next step, which is the wash. The purpose of the wash step is to darken or shade the more recessed areas of the robe. We need to use the color of paint that yellow looks like when it is in the shade. Consulting the Color Chart, you locate yellow under the heading Color. Move across that yellow line until you find the color listed beneath the heading Wash. For yellow, that is light brown. The color yellow, in the shade, will appear as light brown. You mix up a wash of light brown and you slop that wash over your yellow robes. The idea behind the wash is a simple one. Because a wash is so runny, it won't cover the elevated portion of the figures. The wash will run off those. As the water evaporates and the wash dries, light brown will pool and show only in recessed areas of the robes. You now have a nicely shaded robe which required no special skill to achieve. All that was required was knowing the trick. Now it is time for the third step needed in maximizing the light and dark contrast. Just as the most recessed areas of our yellow robes will appear darker (light brown), the most raised areas will appear lighter than yellow. Consulting the color chart for yellow again and reading across the line, we find under the heading marked Dry-Brush, the color white. Yellow raised to the light appears to the eye to be white. We work white paint into a brush and wipe the brush until the brush looks dry. Then, using a very light touch, we take a swipe across the surface of our yellow robes with the brush. Little white flecks should adhere to the most raised portions of the robes. Our light-and-dark contrasting is complete. The process is then repeated for the other colors to be used on the figure. The last stage is similar to that for any painting method. Any belting or strapping is painted, using full strength paint. Reiteration You have now already learned just about all there is to learn about both theory and methodology of contrasting light and dark for realistic figure painting. A little practice will suffice for learning the right mixing consistencies both for stains and washes and for using the correct light touch in dry-brushing. To reiterate:
Color Chart
* These colors for dry-brushing are easily made by adding white to the appropriate stain color. ** White is the exception to normal stain/wash/dry-brush procedure. See on the Color Chart that Gray/Black is given as the wash for white. Strictly speaking, this isn't true. There is no wash for white. Gray or black (your choice, depending on how much contrast you want) are the correct shading colors for white. However, white can't be washed. It will turn gray if it is. So, in the case where you want a white robe or coat, etc., you stain the figures gray or black, delete wash step entirely and dry-brush white. Recommendation for Dry-Brushing Because dry-brushing with white or a tint of a stain color you have mixed yourself by adding in some white is so common, we suggest you might want to pick up a tube of acrylic Titanium White paint at the art supply store. Right out of the tube, it is thick and non-watery, which is handy for dry-brushing techniques. You can also paint with other tube acrylic colors. Controlling that medium when staining and washing, however, isn't as easy as working with bottled paints. Priming Traditionally, figures are primed white as paint is translucent, which means that light will pass through it and bounce back. When the light bounces back, the lighter the priming coat that is beneath the paint, the brighter the color appears to the eye. Many excellent painters never use anything but white primer. We like to prime black for two reasons: First, black-prime gives more exaggerated light-and-dark contrast; second, black priming permits faster paint jobs, which is attractive when you are trying to turn out large numbers of figures in a short time. Black priming is not faster because there are fewer steps. It's faster for a reason not usually considered. How much time is spent examining each figure to make certain that the last coat of paint covered each part of the figure it was supposed to? A lot of time is spent looking to insure nothing has been missed every time a new color is added. All this time examining spread over batches of figures is soon a matter of considerable loss of time. With black-prime anything you've missed jumps out at you. Figure examination time is greatly reduced. With white priming, you really must paint all the detail on the figure, as it will be obvious that you didn't if you skip. With black priming, it is possible to skip many details. The black primer makes it appear that they have been painted and they are in shadow. In other words it is really necessary to paint only the top surfaces of most detail, e.g. a cartridge box. The edges can be dispensed with. Anybody who has spent much time painting will recognize the large amount of time normally spent carefully edging detail. But with the black prime, you can achieve the effect which master painters laboriously achieve by carefully black-lining detail with a marker pen or a very tiny brush. The trick to painting black-primed figures is in the first step after priming. You want to "damp-brush" the figures with white. Your brush is slightly more moist than it should be for dry-brushing because it is necessary that the white cover more of the surface than it covers if dry-brushing was used. However, you still want the white kept out of the more recessed areas, which are black, so don't use too moist a brush. And use a light touch, as you would for dry-brushing the figure. Next, you stain with whatever basic color you have selected. Because the most raised areas are under-coated white and the more recessed areas black, your stain color will appear as lighter and darker, respectively, giving the necessary contrast to permit you to skip that step which follows next with white-priming: the wash step to achieve a shading. Instead, go directly to dry-brushing a lighter highlight color. You may discover, as we have, that priming white is best for some jobs and black for other ones. Below are listed some of the jobs that we always use black prime for:
Brushes The following size and types of brushes we recommend for the various techniques we've discussed:
Brush Care When changing colors during a painting job, rinse the brush, rub into a cake of soap and rinse again. The soap breaks up the paint and it rinses out easily. When it is time for clean-up, wet all brushes, twirl in the soap cake, shape each into a point with the fingers and allow brushes to dry with soap impregnated in them. This will keep a good point on each brush and greatly extend brush life. Of course, you should rinse before using again. General Hints for Mass Production When you are trying to turn out the largest number of figures in the shortest time, here are a few general rules that will help. Use the biggest brush that you can get away with. One large time-waster is constant trips for more paint because a smaller brush than necessary is used. If you shape good points on your larger brushes, as explained above, a larger brush than you suspect will often serve quite well. Try to use the same color more than once on a figure, especially the earth colors (browns and blacks). If the hair is brown, maybe the shoes or pack can be painted in the same brown. Remember you can always apply a wash to one or the other to alter it later. Such a quick wash or even quicker dry-brushing easily makes one basic color into several. Don't be too fussy if you slop over when painting and don't try and fix slop-overs as they occur. Wait until you are completely finished painting. Often you will find that you don't really have as many slop-overs to fix as you thought because to the eye they have blended into the shading. |
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| Top of Page | Painting | Tips & Guides | DBA Resources | Last Updated: December 2, 2003 Questions, comments, suggestions welcome. |
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