Painting Miniatures 4: Painting

This is the fun part: literally playing with color.  But wait; first we need to get our stuff ready.

a. Equipment

Back when I was painting polystyrene model airplanes, I would use Testors oil-based enamels.  Today most people paint miniatures with water-based acrylic paints.  Your painting equipment (brushes, palette, water jar, etc.) will reflect the nature of your paints.

Obviously you will need brushes.  You should be able to find these at your friendly local gaming store (FLGS), or you may be able to find these at an art supply store.  You will want some range of brushes.  Your largest brush will probably be a zero (0) size brush, and you will want some smaller brushes, until you can paint the tiny dot of color that is the colored part of a miniature warrior's eye (I use a 20/0 size brush).

You will need a small water container to rinse off your brushes.  An old (clean) squat salsa jar should work fine.

I use an old "coaster" CD for a paint palette.  When I'm done, I can rinse it and use steel wool or a scrub pad to scrape off any dried paint.

You will want an absorbent rag to soak up excess paint and pull dirty water out of your brushes.  I use a ragged t-shirt.

Back in Assembling, I told you about using a polyethylene drop cloth to catch drops of glue.  You want to use that when painting, to catch drops of paint.

Good lighting is extremely helpful.  I recommend a nice bright full-spectrum or daylight-type desk lamp; I got a cheap swing-arm desk lamp with a daylight-type compact fluorescent bulb, and it works pretty well for me.

Having a thick pin (like a T-pin or a hat pin) is helpful if your paint gets clogged in a squeeze-bottle nozzle; you can poke the clog open with the pin.  DO NOT try to squeeze the paint harder and harder through the clogged nozzle, or it will squirt all over and the paint may be water-based, but WATER WILL NOT GET IT ALL OUT.

Finally, wear clothes that you don't mind accidentally squirting paint on.  Yes, I know you'll be careful, but don't tempt fate.

b. Paints

Miniatures paints are quite different from other acrylic or latex paints.  Miniatures paints are typically very highly pigmented opaque paints with a very thin (non-viscous) body, unlike the comparatively viscous latex paints you use to paint your walls, or the creamy acrylic paints you use to paint your canvas.

Miniatures paints will either come in little squeeze bottles to squeeze paint out of, or little jars to dip brushes into.  I mix colors a lot on the palette, so I prefer the squeeze bottles, which keep me from contaminating my paint containers with whatever's on my brush.

I generally prefer Acrylicos Vallejo paints, either the Model Color or Game Color lines; they come in the squeeze bottles in a wide range of colors, including both bright hues and subdued shades.  Many other professional miniature painters also use Acrylicos Vallejo paints.

I have also started experimenting with Reaper's Master Series Paints, because they gave me some for free.  They seem okay so far.

c. Colors

Miniatures paints aren't cheap, so you probably can't afford to get the entire 200-color line of paints made by any particular paint manufacturer.  You have to pick and choose.

If you're just going to get your feet wet (so to speak; don't paint your feet) with a small number of miniatures, you can probably just get the colors you will need for those miniatures; so if you have an olive-green troll, a gray frost wolf, and a bright orange fire elemental, you can get just those colors (plus eye colors, accessory colors (does the troll have a brown wooden club?) and other shade-variations to make the monster look more realistic (maybe the frost wolf has a black nose and a white underbelly)) and you're done.

If you're planning to embark on a journey of painting miniatures, consider going the Crayola-box route and get a basic assortment:
The primary and secondary colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet.
Black, white, and a medium brown.

It is also really helpful to have certain colors for fantasy miniatures:
At least one skin tone (appropriate to the kind of people are you painting miniatures of).
At least one "dirt".
A steely metal paint for weapons and armor.
If you paint more than one skeleton, some kind of bone color.
Some kind of wood-tone tan.

The familiar rule of thumb is that if you use more than 3 colors per miniature, you're overdoing it.  That may be appropriate for certain monsters (like lions, tigers, and bears), but let's imagine a typical armed warrior miniature for a moment:
The warrior will have some skin exposed; even if this warrior is dressed for winter, it will likely have an exposed face.  That means at least one color for skin tone.
The warrior is armed; maybe with a bow, maybe with a sword, maybe wood, maybe metal.  Whatever it is, that's another color.
The warrior is clothed; maybe cloth, maybe suede, maybe animal hide.  Whatever it is, that's at least 1 more color, for a total of 3 colors.
But what of the warrior's hair?  That's one more color.  What about the warrior's accessories, like a belt, boots, a pack, etc.?  That's at least one more color.  What about eyes?  That could be another color.  And then there's the ground the warrior is standing on.

d. Mixing colors

With this theoretical paint color wheel, combining two colors from the edge creates a muted color somewhere between the points inside the circle, not a vibrant color on the edge.  

Mixing colors can be a challenge, because some colors are just more potent on the palette than others:
White is usually pretty reliable; but black can often swallow up any other color you mix with it.
Red, orange, and green are also usually very potent; mix something with red, and you just get a variation of red; and so on with orange and green.  Some of this may be psychological, but some of this may be due to the nature of the chemical pigments involved, and the nature of transparent and opaque color.
If you have a bright primary red paint, but you want a subtle red color, you can mix the two colors adjacent to red on the color wheel (orange and violet) for a more muted and perhaps fashionable red.  And so on with the other colors; of course blue and yellow make green, but maybe blue paint and yellow paint mix to create a different green than your straight-out-of-the-paint-bottle green.  Consider the (theoretical) paint color wheel; at the center is gray, and if you mix colors from the edges, you don't follow the edge of the circle, you generally draw a straight line through some of the grayish interior.

e. Technique

With the warrior, his exposed skin was the deepest area; with the swarm of beetles at the bottom left, it was the dirt underneath the beetles.  With the lions, I went for an all-over fur color.

The general rule for painting is to paint the deepest (most difficult to isolate) areas first, then to put down subsequent layers until you get to the extremities.

Closeup of the warrior and lioness

Following this general rule, and using our warrior example above (in Colors), the deepest area will be the skin, so we start with the skin tone.  Then we see that our warrior has a long coat over some trousers, with trousers tucked into boots; working from deepest layers outward, let's paint trousers, then boots and accessories, then the long coat.  The warrior's long hair drapes over the clothes, so now we paint the hair.  Finally, we paint the warrior's weapon.  And now I notice that I didn't color the warrior's eyes; but I have a really thin brush for painting tiny dots for eyes.

For animals and naturalistic monsters, I usually lay down a base color, and layer general shades, and finally work on details like eyes, teeth, claws, etc.

f. Skin Tones

I've never seen a dragon, so I can't tell what looks like an abnormal color on a dragon.  I've seen lots of orange cats, and I know that the orange color on a cat is very unlike the orange color on a tangerine, but I wouldn't be too disturbed to see a tangerine-orange paint job on a cat miniature.  However, human skin tones are another matter.

Skin tones may be your biggest challenge, because we look at skin all the time, and it is a survival advantage to know what abnormal skin looks like: if someone looks pale, flushed, inflamed, jaundiced, bruised, nauseated, ashen, unshaved, dirty, scarred, etc., we notice it.  Trying to add diversity by adjusting a basic "peach" skin tone to look just a little Mediterranean (or Asian, or anything else) can be tricky, but very rewarding.  Practice, practice, practice!  Consider different paints to mix in.  Study reference images and compare your results to the effect you wanted to achieve.

g. Dry-Brushing

"Dry-brush" is a popular technique where you remove almost all the paint from the brush, and brush what's left onto a specific area.  Try to imagine removing dust using a damp sponge: you want just enough moisture to pick up the dust, without having so much moisture to leave a puddle.  It creates a translucent effect kind of like shading with pastel or charcoal.  This technique is most used with highlights (very effective with hair), burn marks, and other small shaded areas.

h. Washes

If you do choose to use a wash, this will change the appearance of the underlying colors.  Generally, a dark wash will make underlying colors appear darker.  Also, For example, a orange-brown wash will "fight" with an underlying purple or blue, causing it to look more reddish or even grayish.  A dark gray wash can almost drain the color out of your paint job.  Accordingly, if you plan to use an all-over wash, prepare by making your underlying colors brighter and more vibrant than you intend them to look when they are finished.