In which I rant about painting.

I recently moved to beautiful British Columbia, full as it is of Australians,* and after several weeks of disruption and annoyance, I decided to turn my hand to painting.

I started by trying my hand at some GW Rangers of Middle Earth figures. This was not successful. These figures actually have a lot of detail. Which got lost under my first attempt to use GW foundation flesh paint.

Tonight I tried my hand at some Rohirrim figures (again GW – I am not experimenting on any mithrils).

I’ve a trick for some nice outdoorsy flesh tones: start with Vallejo flat brown, add in vallejo flat flesh and mix. Then add more flat flesh as highlights until it gets rather pale. Then add in a bit of basic flesh tone until the whole lot is done. I went back to this method for these four figures.

This has refused to work. The paint remains wetter than normal, and the brushes tend to drag the paint in a really weird way across their features. Some of this is new brushes which aren’t much good (though one is really expensive) and some of it is lack of practice. And some is…arggghhh!

This is really frustrating.

Any of ye in damper climes have some other successful methods?

Gavin

* Also, lots of Chinese, Brits and even the occasional Canadian.

The china town is pretty good

Well, this morning I experimented again with GW’s foundation flesh – I put on the foundation flesh paint, then a highlight of it and bleached bone, then the new flesh wash, with extra bleach bone in future highlights.

Not bad, though nowhere near as good as i was getting before. Though I have mostly painted a GW Aragorn figure just because. But still, this was a pain in the backside. The current method will just have to do for now.

I also need new paintbrushes.

Gavin

I bought a…whisper it…. a Citadel paint brush which is mildly better than the last one. Going to hunt down an art store today and pick up a few more.

Though I am getting to the point that I can officially paint a Mithril again. Whee.