All posts tagged: painting

Conversion Points - an Outdated System by Rob

Conversion Points in Painting Scores: Why They Should Pass Into History

Published by Rob @ iToysoldiers

Good morning, class.  In today’s “History of Miniature Wargaming” lesson we’re going to talk about a concept called, “Conversion Points” and how they factored into painting scores, why this approach was introduced, and how some forward thinking event organizers led the charge to make the conversion points a thing of the past. Much like the fossil fuels used in the 20th and 21st centuries, conversion points were added into painting scores for a number of really great reasons but as miniature model technology improved the need for them to be present was eventually phased out. To extend the metaphor, Zero Point technology made oil based industry obsolete.  And like ZPT and the Oil Wars, conversion points led to massive conflicts before their use was deemed obsolete.  For the next eight hours (Solar Standard) we’ll be discussing this topic and the impact it had on the history of competitive play in relation to miniature wargaming… I jest, of course. There probably won’t be a war. But this blog post really is about how conversion points in …

Watch This Brush Control with Kujo Painting

Watch This: Brush Control – Tips on Holding Your Brush

Published by Joe B

If you find it hard to get your paintbrush to go exactly where you wanted it to go, you aren’t alone. In this Watch This, Kujo Painting shares tips on holding your paintbrush to get fine detailed brush control. If you can ignore the cheesy music interruptions, Kujo’s tips are really handy and stabilizing your hands and putting the bush to work. Let’s watch: My Notes For quick reference, or for those who like words, I put his ideas into my notes below. The point is to be able to get paint exactly where you want it Use the middle finger on your painting hand to rest the brush Index finger and thumb pinch it against your middle finger With your other hand holding the mini (or a cork handle in this case) stick your thumb up high enough to rest your painting hand against Elbows on the table! Place the brush against the model and use your index and thumb to pull the brush backward It should slide against your middle finger Do a …

Guest Post by Ben on Painting Blue Adeptus Mechanicus

Painting Blue AdMech

Published by Ben Dake

Hi there fellow hobbyists and welcome to the inaugural “Painting With The Moose” article! Ben from Moose Studios joins Broken Paintbrush as a guest writer with this great tutorial on painting blue AdMech. His social accounts are at the bottom, so welcome Ben and give him a follow! In the next few minutes, I will break down how I achieve the blue paint scheme that I have chosen for my Adeptus Mechanicus War Convocation. Before I begin any painting project, there are a few steps that I go through that save me some time and headache as the project progresses. Painting In Sub-Assemblies First, I always paint my models in sub-assemblies. For this project, I separated the individual models into four parts: torsos, heads, legs, and arms. All you need to do this is an inexpensive box of push pins. I treated myself and sprung for the jumbo push pins. This makes it easy to hold and paint without actually touching the model. Trust me when I say that once you do this, it will …

Dreadtober Showcase #4 Painting Completion

Dreadtober Painted Showcase

Published by Joe B

Ladies and Gentleman, October has pretty much come to an end. This week our participants were challenged to finish their models, completing their Dreadtober pledge. While there is still one week left of the challenge where we will work on photography, today we put our brushes down and declared victory! Gothmog This Red Hunter’s Mortis Dread was achieved simply with successively brighter silver undercoats and then washes of blood letter glaze for the red and seraphim sepia for the gold, with some Nuln oil in all the recesses and exposed silver parts. This method can achieve these results in a single night and is a great way to get a Tabletop/tournament quality army ready to go. Blog: sepulchreofheroes.blogspot.com Albie So the base for my dreadnought is designed after the red rocky terrain of Mars. I started with a blank base and a piece of 1/4″ thick cork. This way the dreadnought will stand over most other models. I broke away pieces until I liked the shape fitting on the base and so the dreadnought could …

Finish the Model Challenge

Dreadtober Challenge: Paint the Details

Published by Joe B

Let’s finish this! This is it my friends, the final week to paint your models for Dreadtober. Welcome to Challenge #5: Finish Your Model. We are now in the last week of October with the deadline of Saturday, October 29th and the very much, hard stop, never go past it (just kidding) deadline. Up to this point, each of you has been challenged to plan, build, start painting and finish the base. Now it’s time to finish it. Challenge: Finish Your Model This week’s challenge is relatively straightforward: finish painting your dreadnought. Perhaps you need to add weathering, decals, and final highlights. Maybe you need to catch up. Some of you might even be starting just now. Whatever needs to be finished, your challenge is to finish it this week. Result: Your Completed Dreadtober Modeled By Saturday I will be posting the Finished Model Showcase where I hope each of your will have completed your Dreadtober Pledge. We can all rejoice in completing this epic journey together and enjoy the fruits of our tears. If …

Build and Paint a Custom Base

Building and Painting a Custom Base

Published by Joe B

A model’s base can be tricky business. Make it too simple, and the model looks simple, make it too busy, and it drowns out the model. One solution is to buy some of the amazing resin bases on the market, but sometimes you want to create a custom base yourself. So let’s do it. Today is a tutorial on building a custom base with spare bits, clay, and sand. After completing the base, I add a few extra tips on painting it. While this one is more of an urban ruin, you can also check out my tutorial for a muddy base. FYI: this is a huge post with a ton of pictures. If you aren’t able to read it now or want to save it for later, I put it into a PDF to download as well! Just skip to the form at the bottom, I will then email you the link to download whenever you want. Planning Your Base Yeah, I’ve been harping on this work ‘plan’ for a bit lately, but it …

Dreadtober Basecoat Showcase

Dreadtober Basecoat Painting Showcase

Published by Joe B

We are half way through the Dreadtober challenge and our participants have completed the third challenge: Paint your Miniature (with base colors). As you check out their progress below, keep in mind that each week’s challenge is more of guidance and not everyone follows it exactly.  Some have already finished, others are just getting started! In the end we are all having fun building and painting an awesome dreadnought-like model! Check out their progress below, leave them a comment below, or give them a follow to see more of their work. Basecoat Painting Showcase Note: Some are copied from last week as they weren’t able to make progress (life ya know!) but I still want to highlight the awesome work everyone is doing. Albie 3rd Company Imperial Fists Venerable Dreadnought I’ve made a lot of progress on this Venerable Dreadnought in the last week and it is practically finished! All that is left are the little things. The Imperial Fists colors are tough. Yellow is a terror, but I like the way it looks. Some …

Good Reads 37

Good Reads 37

Published by Joe B

Good Reads is all about sharing some awesome content from fellow hobby bloggers. Every day you guys are building, painting, and writing some amazing things. I try to gather some of my favorites here to share with all of my readers. With Dreadtober in full swing, I haven’t been able to fully keep up with all the blogs, so if I haven’t commented lately, sorry! And since I missed last week’s post, this one will be a bit longer than normal. Keeper of Secrets Not one to wait another dozen years for the model, WestRider converted his own Slaanesh Demon Prince from a Vermin Lord. It’s an incredible twist on the Dark Princelings. Death Rattle Army One of the nice benefits of the new ruleset in Age of Sigmar is being able to create small armies that play well. No longer needing blocks of 100 skeletons, Heaven’s Teeth built up this Death Rattle army rather quickly and it looks great. Learning About Infinity Corrm recently had a guest writer, Chris Rhode, who shared his experience on …

Mentor Legion Painting Guide for the base colors

Painting the Mentor Legion Dreadnought Part 1

Published by Joe B

Ready to start painting your model but not sure how to begin? In today’s tutorial I will show you how to paint a Mentor Legion Dreadnought with plenty of tips and tricks that you can apply to your own models. This is part two of this six-part series for Dreadtober 2016. Last week I showed you my processes for building a custom model through kit bashing. In this post we do all the main colors, leaving the final details for another tutorial. The Mentors are a great chapter to teach a bunch of different colors as they have white (gloriously hard white!), dark green and red, and I even throw in some yellow to mark them as the second company. Add in the metallics, cabling, lenses, and later detail work I am pretty confident that there will something in here for you. Getting Started We left of last week’s tutorial with an assembled model ready for paint. So the first thing to do is give him a coat of primer. The primer does two things: …

Challenge #3 Basecoat Painting

Dreadtober Basecoat Painting Challenge

Published by Joe B

This is Challenge #3 of Dreadtober 2016! At this point, you built your model, and now it is time to start the basecoat painting for your miniature. As we progress through the Dreadtober challenge, each week’s goal is to get you one step closer to accomplishing your pledge.At this point, you have put together your plan and then built the actual miniature. Now we move on to slapping down paint. Challenge: Paint Your Miniatures This week’s challenge: paint your miniature. That’s it, just finish painting it all in a week. OK, so unless you are one of those guys who can crank out armies in a day, this week’s challenge is simply to paint the main colors of your dreadnought. Skip the base, skip the details, skip the weathering. Apply whatever ‘base colors’ means to your miniature and painting style, and get it done. Result: A Basecoated Model At the end of this week,  you should have your model painted as many would call Ebay ‘pro-painted’ level. Meaning it has more than just a primer …

Watch how to paint books and freehand text

Watch This: Painting Books

Published by Joe B

The Silver Tower came with a lot of books, but they are a common addition to Librarians, Grey Knights, Wizards, and all sorts of book lovers. Some seem some amazingly done books and parchments done by awards winning painters. For the rest of us getting started with it, Victor Ques made a nice video on painting books. This how-to guide to painting books doesn’t get fancy or use an airbrush. In fact, Victor only uses a few colors to achieve a fantastic result. Check out his video and then some more of my notes below. (note: there is a section in the middle where he almosts moves off screen, but just for a moment) Painting Books by Victor Notes Pretty simple right? Basically, paint the main colors, wash to provide depth and wear, and then a bit of fine brushwork – probably the hardest part. But with anything in our hobby, after a bit of practice, it becomes easier to do. Let’s go back through his steps: Base Colors Paint book cover Mornfang Brown Paint pages …

Guest Author D Powers on the Mindset of Painting

Guest Post: The mindset of painting

Published by Lonely Kitbasher

Hallo!  D Power from I’m Alone with a Dream here.  In this guest post, I’d like to ramble on a bit about a favored hobby horse; the mindset behind PAINTING. I’ve known of people starting out collecting and painting wargaming miniatures with high hopes and great excitement. Later they become frustrated with what, in truth, is their own style of painting that’s trying to develop– while they repress it with images of what they think is “correct.” Something like what the ‘Eavy Metal studio has produced. While you get neither points nor bad marks for imitating someone’s work you admire, you should not be discouraged from being yourself. Nobody is Norman Rockwell A veteran illustrator friend of mine told me of a time when Norman Rockwell was so popular that everyone tried to imitate him, putting others down for not copying the “proper” style.  While this peer pressure isn’t quite so present in the wargaming community, some people tend to think it is, and that’s sad really. Time passed, and because nobody was Norman Rockwell, nobody …