Reply To: [unofficial weekender] community shattered!

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So in my pursuit of becoming a better (ok, let’s be honest, just a faster) painter, I took myself along to my FLGS. A guy called Adam was running a half-day course on miniature painting at the Dice Saloon in Brighton. While I’ve learned to stop hating my particular painting style, his example mini looked too intriguing – volumetric shading and correct placement of edge highlighting was something I was desperate to learn, but I also picked up a few really valuable tips along the way.

Firstly, the key to speed painting is to use a bigger brush!
While that might sound obvious, it needs a little more explaining – a while back, my favoured workhorse brush was around a size zero. Then I discovered that, by loading the brush fully with paint (instead of dabbing just the tip into it) I was getting better results with a larger brush (even on smaller areas). So I ramped it up and even now, I paint about 90% of my mini with a size 2 sable (for anyone interested, the green-handled Pro Arte watercolour sable brushes are fantastic).

I thought this was a pretty big brush. So I was amazed when I was given this monster

Turn your monitor upside-down if you need to – make sure you read that right; it’s not a size six.
It’s a size nine brush!

Which leads onto the other thing I learned today – the consistency of your paint is almost (if not more) important than the size of your brush. With a honking great big brush, with a nice point and paint at the correct consistency you can be far more precise and get a far better finish than painting with a smaller brush a thick, lumpy paint.

The easiest way to get correct paint consistency was surprisingly simple: always mix two colours. It was as easy as that. Even if the “second colour” is exactly the same as the first. It’s the act of moving a wet brush through the paint (to mix two colours together, for example) that not only creates the right consistency (for clarity, we were mixing paint on a wet palette) but also loads it fully into the bristles of the brush, meaning you don’t have to keep returning to the paint to load it up – it also means the paint flows easily and readily off the brush, onto the model (instead of scraping it off the brush onto the surfaces, like wiping dog mess off the side of your shoe!)

And after just two hours of painting here’s the result:

Other than the eyes and a bit of the edge highlighting, it was painted almost exclusively withe a number nine brush!
Now it’s not as precise as I’d normally paint (and I’d probably go back and tidy up a few of the edges). But on a normal day, I’d struggle to get a mini like this finished in more than twice this time. I’ll be honest, the black/grey isn’t anywhere near as good as I’d have liked – but the red (particularly the shading) is really quite impressive!

And the other thing I learned today?
Push the contrast. However much you think you’ve gone as bright as you dare – go brighter.
Here’s my mini alongside a couple of other marines painted during the same session:

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t put white anywhere near a black object – even for specular highlights. Being seeing my model alongside others painted by the other guys in the same class, it’s clear that’s what I’m missing. You know how you make black look really super dark and shiny? By painting it white!