Thanks ! I think it works.

BoW Romain

Thank you for your interest and questions, @ubiquanon !

I use tap water for all my miniature needs, but do check the hardness of your local water supply… In some areas, you may get a water that has unintended effects on your painting. In such a case, use bottled water (distilled if you prefer, but it doesn’t really matter).

Also, sometimes, when you use too much water and when you leave droplets on your surfaces, it dries and leaves little circles as the surface tension of the water makes the pigment particles accumulate on the edges of the droplet. The key is not having too much water or paint on your brush, or “breaking” the drops as much as possible, spreading the paint in a thin veil. Some people also use a small drop of mixing medium to prevent that sort of thing, but it has other effects you might not want, such as prolonging the drying time (when water actually speeds it up).

“Quick and dirty” metal is fine, even on heroes, if you want a high contrast and subdued shadows… It all depends on what you want to do. However, I seldom “just” do a black wash over metal myself, as I find it a bit crude… In this tutorial and in most of my personal works, I try to find a color that is non metallic version of the metal used, or slightly darker. Either that, or I try and enrich my tones in dfferent ways…

But I’ll probably do a tutorial about that some other time.

I don’t remember the final count of the washes on the metals, but the metals still aren’t done yet.. I still have to oxydize them properly, and there’s highlight to be made ! You can very well leave them at that, or do a lot less than what I did, but there’s no point in not showing you how to do something fancy !

I’d say there’s priming black, priming grey, priming white, basecoat (3 thin coats, more or less), shading with one color (2 coats, but you would get better results doing more), shading with black/grey for shadows and contrast (2 coats, 3 or 4 in some places, but only in the shadows), oxydizing (1 or 2 coats in some places, but for a fancier, more realistic result, you’d better do more coats, more transparent !), highlights (3 different coats, I believe, but I could be wrong, and you’d do well to work more with transparencies).

That’s around 16 or 17 coats all told for the metals, but for the filming of a tutorial you can hardly spend days on a single miniature, so it’s not as extensively blended and well done as it could have been… Just enough so that you get the gist of what to do.

But of course, the whole surface isn’t completely covered each time… And even on the surface that is indeed painted by a single coat, we’re working with extremely thin coats, washes and glazes. It’s all transparent, and none of the details are drowned in paint.

I hope I’ve answered your questions…

In any case, don’t hesitate to question how I do things, experiment, see for yourself… And paint the way you like to paint ! It’s always better.

BoW Romain