Tutorials

Homemade Flock Recipe

This is a recipe for homemade flock (used to simulate grass and ground foliage in homemade war-game terrain) made from wood pellets of dehydrated compressed pine sawdust. This type of pellet is sold in 20lb or 40lb bags as kitty litter, pet/stable bedding, or fuel for a wood-burning stove or furnace. As long as it’s made of an untreated dehydrated compressed sawdust, it should work.

Yes, of course you can make flock with regular sawdust if you have a convenient source, but there are two advantages to using dehydrated pellets. One, the color is absorbed deeply into the sawdust as it rehydrates and expands. Two, the colored flock will dry much faster than painting regular sawdust that has less capacity to absorb the water and paint. If you have a cheap or free source for conventional sawdust you probably still will prefer to continue using that and whatever method works for you. If you can’t get free sawdust and would have to buy something anyway, this recipe is perfect for you.

Using a blender or coffee grinder, grind up a little more than 2 cups of dehydrated wood pellets and set aside. If you make extra for a later batch, store it in a tub with a lid to keep it dry.  Grinding the pellets is not essential, but it is very helpful.  This makes them re-hydrate almost instantly without requiring any soaking time, and you can tell immediately if you have the right ratio of sawdust to paint.

In a separate container, combine several colors of cheap acrylic paint (normally shades of green, yellow, and brown) to make about half a cup of the desired color, and thin with an equal volume of water. Aim for 1 cup of your paint/water mixture. Stir thoroughly, to the consistency of milk.

Place 1.5 to 2 cups of your ground-up pellets into a container large enough to contain the expanded sawdust with ample room for stirring (a one-gallon bucket is great). Stir in your paint/water mixture until all of the sawdust is damp and colored. If any unabsorbed liquid remains, stir in a little more sawdust until completely absorbed. The sawdust should not be soggy once it is mixed. Use more sawdust or less water if your pellets don’t soak up all of the moisture at this ratio.

Spread out the damp colored sawdust on a large piece of cardboard to dry. The cardboard will soak up some of the excess moisture if the flock is a little too saturated. Sponge off the top with some paper towels.

Once dry, your flock can be further ground and sifted before use, to the desired fineness of grain. Happy modeling!

Miniature Painting Tips and Theory

Introduction

The pen is mightier than the sword, and so is the brush.  A great paint job can improve an average sculpt, but a terrible paint job can ruin a beautiful figure.  I’d like to help you elevate your fantasy RPG and historical wargame tabletop miniatures to gorgeous display-quality, or at least show you how not to ruin them.  Some of your success will depend on your own talents, but if you feel you are lacking talent, remember that all skills can improve with practice.  I hope to give you some valuable guidelines and tutorials that can set you on the right track and save you months or years of trial and error and botched minis.

Let’s consider materials before we go further.  28mm scale (and similar) tabletop miniatures are available in a variety of different materials from cast metals to 3D-printed plastics.  Additionally, they can be painted with water-based acrylics or oil-based paints and enamels.  The techniques I’m sharing with you here can be used with any material and paint, for the most part, but there are a few things to consider with each option.

Metal-cast miniatures were once the mainstay, and are still the top choice for many hobbyists because of their durability and the level of detail made possible by casting in metal.  The solid-feeling hefty weight they have is nice also.  However, miniatures cast in plastics and resins are often significantly cheaper, which is a nice tradeoff for the sometimes softer details or fragility.  Many 3D-printing materials limit the level of detail, but provide a great benefit in that you can manufacture your own figures, and even build your own supremely customized 3D models to print.  I started with this hobby when nearly all minis were metal and contained lead.  Newer lines such as Reaper Bones are a flexible plastic polymer that bends and never breaks.  I find they have a nice level of detail and can be painted with acrylic paints without any need for an additional primer.  Reaper also sells metal miniatures at typically three times the cost of the plastic Bones figures.  I still love the old-school metal cast figures like I used to buy from Grenadier and Ral Partha, but all things considered, I honestly really like the new stuff too, especially for the price.

Let’s look at paint and some of the most basic differences between them.  Acrylic paints are thinned with water and so do not generally emit any strong odors, and don’t require chemical paint thinners.  However, painting most metal and plastic miniatures (Reaper Bones are a notable exception) with acrylic paints almost certainly requires priming the figures before painting, as well as sealing afterward with some type of clear-coat or varnish.  Enamels such as the traditional Testors model paints can often be used on metal figures without additional primers, and are durable enough that they may not even require a sealant, as long as they are handled carefully.  However, enamels can disagree with some plastics and stay tacky to the touch for weeks, or never properly dry.  I am painting both metal and plastic miniatures these days, and although I never used acrylics on metal until recently, they work just fine as long as they have a base coat of some kind of primer to stick to.  I have primed with a Testors enamel paint and then taken over with acrylics with no ill effect.  However, I don’t recommend enamels for the Reaper Bones plastic — they stick but don’t dry.  As with everything, some materials are better than others as well.  There are paint lines sold by the miniature manufacturers that are pricier than the all-purpose paints, but they are also better and generally formulated to flow correctly at the right consistency for miniatures without thinning except when desired.

You certainly do not need to purchase every figure in the same material, or buy only one type of paint.  When your paint job is consistent and you develop confidence in your own ability and style, your miniatures will have a great degree of uniformity in their looks, regardless of what each of them is made of.  You may have a favorite material, a favorite manufacturer, or just choose individual sculpts you like without consideration of either.  The goal is to have them all look like yours, wherever they came from.

Basic Techniques

Painting techniques for miniatures have been developed, perfected and shared by many people over several decades, and I don’t claim to have invented every tip I share with you.  I will address helpful techniques common to miniature painting, and while many of the basic methods are common knowledge, my focus will be on some of my own ideas you can use to make these techniques work even better.  There are three core techniques most painters use to color their miniatures.  These are the base-coat, followed by washes and dry-brushing.  There are many other tutorials available describing these methods, but I’ll explain them briefly for those who are unfamiliar with the terms.

A base-coat is not the same thing as primer.  Primer is usually a special paint sometimes sprayed on, that is meant to adhere strongly to the surface and enable it to receive other paints that will stick to the primer.  A primer coat is almost always a single color.  A base coat is often not.  The base coat should be where you begin to add actual color to the figure and differentiate the surfaces — skin, hair, cloth, leather, metal, etc.

A wash is a mixture of a small amount of paint greatly thinned out (with water or another thinning agent for acrylics, paint thinner for enamels) which is useful for adding a very light tint on top of another color, or allowing a very liquid dark color to collect in the crevices and undersurfaces to bring out detail and simulate shadows.

Dry-brushing is usually accomplished with a small amount of paint and no thinning agents (i.e. mostly a dry brush with a little paint on it) and is very commonly used to simulate highlights on a surface as it receives light from the imaginary in-game light source.

Combining theory with your methods

The reason we paint highlights and shadows onto our miniatures (instead of just painting solid colors) is that they’re very small.  The surfaces of the sculpt do show their own shadows and highlights, but a little additional contrast gives them more of the appearance of full-size objects, and just helps the details pop more at the normal viewing distance (at arms-length on a table-top).  Fine details can disappear at arm’s length, but too much contrast or exaggerated features don’t always hold up at close eye-level examination.  Sometimes it’s a trade-off.  A mini can look perfect close to your eyes while painting, but likely what you really want is detail that’s still visible while playing your game.

Many think of the base coat as being the neutral shade of the colors that the figure will display, or the base color of each area, without shadow or highlight.  This means you might use a wash to create most of your shadows, and then dry-brush some highlights on.  I feel this limits you to requiring a wash for shadows.  Washes are quite useful for many effects, but they are tricky to control or to achieve exactly the result you were aiming for.  Let’s consider getting your shadowed areas covered in the base coat.  Instead of a wash for shadows and a dry-brushed highlight, let’s look at base-coat shadows fleshed out with two or more different dry-brush layers.  This actually gives you a lot more control.  Not only do you not have to get a perfect shadow wash after you’ve already painted a base coat, but you eliminate the risk of your shadows looking like a dark-blue slime has dripped over the entire character.

So how do we use the base-coat to represent all of our shadows?  How do we highlight correctly?  We need to examine how light and shadows work on surfaces in real life.  Miniatures on a gaming table represent soldiers on a battlefield, of course.  They should look similar to full-sized humans viewed from a high vantage under broad sunlight (as historically, most battles were normally not fought in the dark).  How do shadows and highlights appear on a figure in sunlight?  There can be a high degree of contrast, but it largely depends on the surface properties of the material being lit.  We have to think about how those materials look in real life in order to replicate or approximate them correctly in paint.  Cloth is a porous and uneven surface that diffuses and scatters light rather than reflecting it — folds are usually in shadow, but highlights are broad and subdued.  A cloth with brighter and smaller highlights would appear shiny, as if it were silk or even plastic.  Flesh receives a lot of ambient light bounced from the ground and surrounding surfaces, and so shadows on flesh are not usually as dark as cloth folds.  Flesh tones should not appear too shiny either, or the character begins to look sweaty or plastic.  Remember that shininess can be simulated (often unintentionally) and is not just a factor of using gloss paint instead of flat.  A rule of thumb for shadows is that cloth folds and the creases of rougher materials will be darker in comparison to the lit portions than the shadows on almost any other surface, as smoother surfaces receive and reflect more ambient light.  Dark shadows everywhere on miniatures are only desirable if they are there to bring out details or add contrast for visual pop.  The rule of thumb for highlights is that smooth surfaces get a smaller, brighter highlight (the specular highlight in nature is actually a reflection of the light source – the sun), while highlights on rougher surfaces cover a broader area and are less intense (a less defined specular highlight diffused over the surface).  Look at skin and cloth and metal objects in nature outdoors in sunlight, and get a feel for the way shadows and highlights behave, and those observations will help your painting.  The same brown color can appear to be a rough soft suede or a smooth oiled leather depending on your treatment of the highlights and shadows.

I like to mix the base coat of each area of the miniature to represent the apparent color of that surface when it is in shadow.  This way, all of our creases and under-surfaces are done and correct when we move on to the next step.  Your observations should inform you that the shadow color is very often a darker, grayer (less-saturated) hue of the lit color.  Shadows in sunlight also often have a little cast of blue.  If you determine that a figure will wear a bright-red coat/cloak/shirt, you can mix a dab of your sunlit red color and then next to it add some dark gray and/or dark blue to get your shadow equivalent.  Paint on the shadow color and get it into the creases, folds, and undersides especially.  You can paint the lit color while the base coat (shadow layer) is drying if you wish, as this will actually help with blending.  Clean and dry your brush, or clean and set aside if you’re swapping to a different brush.  Dry-brush the normal red over everything except the dark folds and creases to apply the tone for the unshadowed area we’ll call the diffuse highlight color.  For best effect, brush in the direction that sunlight would be falling — you do need to break this rule to hit all of the details you want to bring out, but generally the lit portions (the ones receiving the most direct light) are lit directionally from wherever the sun is (with a little ambient light and color bouncing off the ground).  If it helps, you can even think of the rays of sunlight falling in the direction of your brush as you ‘apply light’ to the figure.  Again, get a nice even coverage with this layer because it will become the base for the highlight layer.  Now mix in a little white with a touch of yellow or light blue to create the tone for the specular highlights.  For cloth, the highlight color should not be as light as the shadows are dark, i.e. it should not vary quite as much from the middle color as the shadow color does.  Dry-brush this highlight color broadly over the areas that are receiving sunlight from above.  If you want the cloth to look silky or the sunlight affect to appear as very brightly lit, apply a second specular dry-brushing layer just a little heavier over the sharpest highlight areas (a smaller area than the first specular highlight).

Do I need washes at all then?

Yes.  If the cloak you painted just has too much contrast between the shadows and highlights, a wash of the diffuse/median color can tone down the contrast in the direction of the median hue.  Should the cloak look muddy or stained?  Washes work great for stained, battered, grimy and grungy materials.  Also, if some of your shadows filled in when you dry-brushed over them, or if they’re just not dark enough, try a wash to get some darker tint back into the desired creases.  Washes are a generally useful tool and are great for any of these purposes, especially for dirtying things up.  The problem is when they tend to dirty things up unintentionally or uncontrollably.  Be careful and practice with them and they’ll be easier to control and less likely to surprise you.

Notable exceptions to the general rules

Hair on a character’s head is made of many individual strands and is not overall a smooth surface, yet hair does not look odd if it appears shiny.  Experiment with placing a couple of small bright highlights on your hair to create battlefield shampoo models.

Realistic skin-tones don’t follow exactly the same process you would use for painting a cloak, because a person’s skin is not one solid hue with shadows and highlights applied.  If you can manage it, have some variance in the colors that mimic what you see in nature.  A character might be pale with rosy cheeks, or have a ruddy suntanned appearance in some spots where you’d normally paint highlights.  Again, observe some faces and understand how much variance there is in one person’s complexion, and then let these observations inform your color choices.  Monster skin often benefits from some degree of mottling, adding patchy areas or spots to break up a color that just looks too even to be natural.  Perfecting your skin techniques will add a lot of realism to your miniatures.

Shiny skin is usually not that desirable or natural-looking, but perhaps you’re painting a slimy-skinned monster.  Brighter smaller highlights will make the skin appear wet.  You could even use a gloss paint or varnish, perhaps for an amphibious creature, for an all-over glisten that would otherwise look completely wrong.

Metal and other very smooth hard surfaces have a small bright highlight, and ambient light can also lend them the color of adjacent surfaces due to reflective properties of smooth surfaces.  Painting an approximation of a chrome effect on a helmet or shield might require some painted-on reflection of sky, cloak, and ground where appropriate.

Next Steps

Practice observing nature while thinking about how you might recreate or approximate the things you see in paint and in miniature form.  Look at the work of others for ideas and inspirations.  Most importantly, find the methods that work best for you and practice them a while, and then try something new.  Be flexible and open to different techniques that might serve you, and never stop learning and pushing yourself.