When you’re just starting to paint minis, it it EXTREMELY worthwhile to plan out why and how you’re going to do things the way you are, and keep notes for yourself.
It’s basically about 2 things: teaching yourself the good habits before bad ones get ingrained, and maximising your ability to learn from what you’re doing by giving yourself the best context.
Experience rapidly changes and decreases what it is useful to keep track of, but for your own sake, let your experience tell you when to stop being OCD meticulous. Don’t let your inexperience guide your corner-cutting.
Pretty much everyone can get - comparatively speaking - almost unbelievably much better at painting than Gus currently is, without much time or practise. But lots of people never do, because they make it too hard for themselves to learn from what they’re doing. Try nailing the “craft” part of the hobby before you erroneously convince yourself it’s some sort of magic beyond your reach, because it absolutely isn’t.
Saturation is primarily about how see-through a colour is. If a colour isn’t thick enough to entirely obscure the colour(s) of the surface it’s applied on, its saturation changes.
Hue is all about saturation. You change a colour’s hue either by letting the colour(s) beneath it show through to some degree, or by applying some sort of shading to it, or both.
As with much of the previous stuff we’ve talked about, doing this on paper first is a really good idea.
Yeah, color applied via a physical substance doesn’t map exactly the same as colors of light. That’s why the primary colors of light and pigment differ.
That’s why it’s so hard to take your advice, because you’ve started every message on the subject with comments about how much I suck.
Yeah, but how? I mean, obviously if you put a thin layer over white or black, it’s going to decrease the saturation and change the brightness. But how can you increase saturation? Or is it one of those cases where every possible change reduces saturation, and you must start with fully saturated colors?
Either you’re communicating this poorly, or you don’t know what the term saturation means in color theory. It’s not the same as dilution in paint.
This is another case of stating a principle without any helpful examples. OK, so you change a hue by layering. Or by mixing. In either case, how am I supposed to know what the result will be? Unless I’m trying for something that everyone knows, like yellow + red = orange. I guess that’s one way to go about it - look at the hue wheel, and if you are looking for a specific hue, try mixing the paints to either side of it on the hue wheel.
Ultimately, it’s all light, since that’s what our eyes receive. The differences are still a concern, because pigments work based on what colors they reflect and what colors the absorb. Mixing two pigments won’t give you the same results as mixing two colored beams of light.
Another interesting source of info is the huge mega-thread on the Something Awful forums, depending on your tolerance for such things. If you want to spice up your metalworks, check out methods on NMM (non-metal metallics). It is a pretty difficult technique (well, for me - I’m not exactly talented in any art) and may not be a look you want, but interesting none-the-less (and absolutely amazing when done well).
I need to stop reading this thread. I don’t have a dedicated work area for painting, so don’t do it much because of set-up/tear-down time, but dang it… this gets me itching to do it.
So here’s my first stab at using the Reaper paints (on a Privateer Press mini). I did the basecoat, shade, highlight, and wash sequence, but I’m really not all that happy with how it turned out.
For one thing, I messed up the highlighting. I mixed two drops of the base coat to one of a dirty beige, and I ended up with this light minty green. I was like, well, maybe it will look ok once it dries (the basecoat of grass green was way brighter in liquid form). It did not. Then I put another layer of pure grass green on top of it, which kind of worked ok.
I don’t really feel like the black wash worked very well either. The one place where it worked well is the underside of the tail, where it caught in the ridges of the stripes of slightly different beige (I was trying to recreate the look of the wide scales of a gator’s belly with a smooth surface) and brought out the contrast. Other than that, it didn’t seem to do very well at collecting where I wanted it to collect, mainly the edges of the scales.
Am I overthinking this? Is the paint job actually as bad as I’m thinking, looking at all the ways it went wrong? Regardless of whether it’s bad or merely mediocre, what do I need to do next to improve?
My completely non-expert beginner opinion is that there isn’t enough highlighting in general, and thus looks a bit flat. You want to make the scales a touch “shiny” - may a gloss coat would serve rather than tricks with highlights though?
