WIP - Painting/Converting/Sculpting General

So i started the hobby a year ago and had never painted before. This is the first thing i ever built/painted on the right followed shortly by the one on the left.

Most recent project will follow.

i feel like i've come a long way but still think i'm shit compared to most of the community.

The chalky drybrushing is really lowering the quality of your miniature.

I like it personally

working on my successor chapter of loyal 1kson marines for a painting competition. havent been able to spend as much time on it or do it as well as i'd like due to time constraints, but heres my gradient. mostly done with washes. it now has a shiny layer of spiritstone red all over to give it a glossy look and further blend the colours

ive been trying to replicate this textured look on the carapaces. i don't want them to look super sleek and smooth like an insect. my idea was to make a hive fleet that had adapted to a heavily forested world and the carapaces should look wood like. still haven't perfected it obviously.

You're full of shit, it works perfectly for the carapace.

Working on my new Dark Eldar, thoughts?

The sail could use some sort of freehand.

Like a cool skull.

Sail hasn't even been started yet, still trying to decide on the color, I'm leaning towards a dark red. Basically anything that's white, I haven't worked on yet.

kinda bright for a dark eldar, but i guess i don't know their color schemes at all so i can't say.

This is just my personal color scheme, I figured that while they are sadistic bastards, they also have a sense of style so they wouldn't be all dark and dreary.

Trying to paint 30k Thousand Sons after a long break from the game. Retributor armor is the best gold paint I've ever used. It's awesome, but I'm struggling with the metallic red. Any ideas? I don't have an airbrush, so am thinking about doing layers of mixed washes. But that doesn't work well for vehicles.

Thoughts?

Do a bright silver basecoat and use layers of Blood for the Blood God to give them that nice candy red

mephiston red
glazes and washes
spiritstone red

Having trouble with Skitarii Vanguard right now.

I can't figure which Radium Carbine is meant to go with the body for the Alpha (Torso Pieces 50 & 51 with Leg piece 49). Anyone that's built Vanguards recently able to help out?

youtube.com/watch?v=8ou-nyVd5hw

What about for vehicles? How does that work for you? I've always struggled with washes on them.

honestly i got my sons from the bop box so i dont have any vehicles aside from

Mostly been assembling shit as I need more primer.
I did try repainting my models to have black shoulders and gold faceplates though, think I'll stick with this style for the whole army.

Will try to get more marines done and get started on my SoH contempt or this week.

It works great for the carapace. It wouldn't if it was trying to be metal or something, but this is basically a huge bone plate and it fits well.

Never painted anything before and I'm preparing my first army.

I've gotten all the paints and supplies I want (apart from magnets) and I'm looking to set out a schedule so I can work on these as efficiently as possible.

Would the correct way to be:

Assemble figure
Attach to base
Prime
Paint
Create base art

Or is there a more efficient way?

If you're painting dudes with 2handed weapons like boltguns it's usually better to paint the arms detached from the body because the gun goes across their chest and it's a bitch to get your brush around the gun to paint the chest's details. Also, sometimes attaching their legs to the base may make reaching some details harder or impossible.

it looks pretty good, the main thing I'd like to see is more layers on the green flesh parts which are kinda flat now. I can tell it has some but it needs more. maybe just mix that light green with something a bit lighter and give it another layer. the bone and purple wings are noice though.

also the teeth are kinda flat too maybe do a little yellow wash around the guns and some diluted yellow glaze on the rest.

Brightdar, best dar.

Ok awesome, thanks.

It's about 30 Necron warriors, a 5 Praetorians, a Stalker and an Ark.

what I do:

>clean mold lines
>assemble miniature, keep the hard to paint around parts detached like a boltgun across the chest as mentioned
>glue to base
>prime and paint
>paint the detached bits that are attached to a paperclip
>carefully file/scrape/knife the paint off the parts that need glue for the attached bit, glue that on
>add decals
>glue other bits you might want like a skull or something on base
>put GW texture paint on the base, then wash and drybrush. paint the added base bits
>spray varnish

you need varnish. acrylics rub off super easy, I don't even touch the miniature at all with paint on it because I can easily accidentally rub off paint while painting.

Amazing list, thanks heaps.

i'd like to put in that instead of scraping off the primed parts you need to glue, you can use a tiny dab of blu-tack over the area you'll need to glue, prime over it, then simply remove the blu tak

Whelp, finished my 2k tournament list, played today and won 1st place with it, which is nice because the prize is a free 8th ed box set. Pics of the armies mostly recently finished to come.

Craftworld Fon'du

Servants of the poop-god.

Whos the spooky looking qt in the background?

Power rangers, with only 3 zords.

please tell me these arent finished

Why use rhinos when forgeworld has av 13 versions.

Chaos marines

Fantastic new GW crane and towbot kit, with armless allies.

more poop for you.

That looks rad, user. I really like the weathering/corrosion.

r8 muh boyz

...

Leather wrapping looks off being pure red like that rather than leathery brown
The red on the gun looks like it's just blotched on rather than worn off
The armor is hella™ flat and desperately needs highlights with another color other than your base
Guns are too monochrome and could use red/darker metal plates to break up the single color gray

The horns appear to be done well, though

Tournament fags are the fucking worst.

1/z
Needs more Boy.

He looks good and krumpy.

What would you suggest as far as highlighting the red goes? There's not really a lot of great places to do edge highlighting because I tried to keep the metal showing through around the edges.
I guess could try my hand at some glazing to bring up the brightness on the higher areas of the metal plates.

So, I finished my first box of models ever! Painting took a lot longer than I imagined, but it feels nice to look at the finished result. Hopefully I'll be able to improve in the future.

Also, I only have the mini painting starter set colour wise so I didn't have too many colours to choose from.

>There's not really a lot of great places to do edge highlighting because I tried to keep the metal showing through around the edges.
That's the issue. If this was the intent you didn't take it far enough

Either you have some highlights that are the color of the armor or you play up those worn edges. I feel like you didn't do either in the photos you took.

It's also much easier to make the edges darker and lighter than it is to fuck with raised areas that can't get hit with something like drybrushing

Alright, I'll just hit it with more metal then

Well that's just my opinion. You might want to hold out for another. If I was painting Orks I'd try to go full on fucking hairspray and a metal brush but I've never had to do worn shit before.

the holy trinity of shading is your friend.(nuln oil, Agrax earthshade and reikland fleshshade).

you can shade two different styles, over the whole surface or in the recessed areas.

A huge improvement can be achieved with the usage of washes.

Other than that, keep going. There are certainly worse miniatures out there than yours.

Nah I think you're right. I tried painting the red on over the metal, but it just looks blobbed on there instead of worn, like you said. In the future I'll paint it red first and then "highlight" with metal to hopefully achieve a more worn look.

What would blues be best shaded with? I tried the Nightshade one I got in the starter, but it kinda didn't make much of a difference.

Nice and neat, clean lines, paint doesn't look too thick. Good job. As others have said, a little shading would do wonders for those.

I'd look into tutorials for a proper worn look, but yeah it's ironically a lot harder to paint worn paint on top of metal than it is to paint metal on top of worn paint

blue works with cold colors like blue, green violet.
would recommend using it only in the recessed areas than the whole surface.

it doesn't work well on larger surface since the wash gives a bad texture on just flat areas

Good work, they look unfinished IMO because of the lack of shading. If you now brush some Agrax earthshade or Nuln oil onto the non-flesh parts and it'd look 10xbetter honestly. For the flesh I'd recommend 50% watered down reikland fleshshade and then drybrush over the top with whatever flesh shade you used there. For Marine scouts flesh i do the following.

Base: Bugmans glow
Layer: Cadian flesh
50% watered down reikland fleshshade wash
Drybrush highlight: Kislev Flesh or Flayed one flesh depending on whether I want a more pink or a more pale skintone.

Working on my Blood Bowl team. Right is first guy
finished", left just got hit with Agrax.

Pictures really bring out all the stray splotches of color in the wrong places.

>pictures really bring out all the stray splotches of colour

i'm sure they do, user!

Fuck me.

Going to paint my Dark Angels librarian soon, but I'm not set on which blue range to take yet. Do I go for the typical Macragge Blue set or do I use the darker Kantor Blue set?

Paints for reference.

Weird, the retards on here said librarians don't have to be blue. Yet the DAngels librarian is...ah yes.

>Pictures really bring out all the stray splotches of color in the wrong places.
Yep

Also

GRAYSCALE TEST

I feel like a lighter armor color or a darker armor color and lighter pants color would really help the model

Fuck you, 4chanX I still don't understand you

What specifically do you suggest?

This is really good user, I wouldn't be able to paint something like that.

I'm always scared I'll fuck up my model with varnish and then I would never be able to strip it afterwards. What is the correct way to apply it? Do you have a specific brand you think works best?

Did you thin your paints? Also you need to touch up the one on the right, particularly the silver horns on the head and the gloves.

Nice work though desu.

30k librarians don't have to be blue, I think. But the 40k ones are blue or have blue elements.

Thinking about it, I think a dark pants color would be good.

Something to keep in mind is you want stuff that should stand out to be a brighter color than stuff that should recede or be less noticeable. The armor plating should be the most noticeable since it's being worn on the top layer of the orc. The skin should be a middle color and the pants should be a darker color similar to the shade of the other gray parts of the detail work yet a different hue to set it apart if that's still your intent.

Those pants, especially on the guy on the right aren't important to the overall feel of the model. So if you made those pants a lot darker and the armor a bit lighter I think it would really help.

I find it difficult to explain since I've learned most of the shit instinctively. You need to take hue, saturation, and brightness into account when picking which color should go where and it's not always exact either

Fugg how did that happen

Great scheme, doc.

Newfag here - I'm trying to make white robes.
So far this is my paint list
Base - Rakarth Flesh
Layer - Pallid Wych Flesh, then Flayed One Flesh
Highlights - White Scar
Shading with Nuln
Would this work well? I know that white is supposedly a hard color. I am also colorblind so I don't know if Flayed One Flesh would look really weird over Wych Flesh or something like that.
I've also thought about using greys, but someone suggested to me a while ago to use flesh tones to give it a more cloth-like color.

shade with a thinned blue wash instead, unless you're going for "drab", blue gives a nice bright clothy feel imo

>metal nob

would go killin' an lootin' with yer

Oh, interesting, I hadn't thought of that! Interesting. I might try that on a test robe just to see how it works. It not contrast great with the rest of my army, I'll be using a lot of nuln as the power armor will be metallic a-la IW

It might not*

Started in march, my first 40k minis
i still dont know how to highlight and my hands are quite shakey
i think they're alright except the faves which just look like trash.
anyone have a good guide on how to make them look like they're not in constant misery? I got the guys here for about 8 euros so i thought id try my hand at some imperial boys

them from the back

Working on some soviet tanks. wanted to do a winter weathered paintjob, but i don't know how well it turned out. I'm doing it by hand, how does it look?

from right to left its an IS-1 SU-152 and a T-34

WarhammerTV channel on youtube has some good painting videos.

But looking at your models I can already see some major areas you need to work on.

THIN YOUR PAINTS. One of the reasons your models look bad is because of how thick the paint is. You want a nice thin layer of paint, and it might take 2 or 3 layers before you've got a nice coverage.

Slow down. I can see by the metal barrels on the end of the rifles that you painted over the green before it had dried which is why you have an ugly green tint in your metal.

Slow down. You've rushed it and the models look shit. If I'm painting a model I spend 3 or 4 (sometimes more) hours on it going nice and slow, I use a tiny detail brush on intricate areas. Look at the area where the arms meet the butt of the gun, lots of it has green paint because you weren't careful.

SLOW DOWN and be patient. Let your paint dry.

And finally use a shade wash like Nuln oil or Agrax earthshade to make the creases and detail stand out.

If you do NOTHING else that I just told you, make sure you thin your paints and slow down.

Looks good to me, especially in that scale.

Personally i would have added decals first though.

Second time I've seen you post grayscale test. What does it actually test?

You can paint a model like 6 different colors but if they're all similar brightness it's still going to bleed together. Since a typical model is so small it really helps to vary the brightness of colors in addition to hue to get the different bits to pop out. Otherwise you wind up with something muddied and indistinct.

The first miniature i ever assembled, do you know if I can just paint over the toothpick head?

you can thin your paint even more.
use your thumb to check the consistency and thickness of your paint every time

>not in constant misery
but they're men of the imperial guard