Having recently suffered major burnout for the 2nd time, following finishing a competition/display project, I got to thinking and tried to understand it better rather than it being this thing I was feeling that I had no context for.   The first time I suffered it was after painting the Mucha: Music piece back in 2022, after which I suffered nearly 3 months of burnout that made me abjectly miserable. I tried and tried to push through it, but just felt like I was hitting a brick wall no matter what I tried to do. It basically felt like I’d forgotten how to paint. I couldn’t blend, mix my colours right, my brush control had vanished and everything was a slog.  Then this time it happened again after finishing my Goblin Airship diorama. I felt strange afterward, like I’d been holding my breath during the whole project and finally let that breath out. I wanted to paint and did paint, but again I started going through the phase of feeling like I couldn’t paint anything. Again, I k...

A lot of new painters want to jump straight into this advance technique without realising it is built on the foundation of most of the basics along with a couple of intermediate techniques.   The basics being; blending, glazing, layering, colour mixing, contrast, and edge highlighting. The intermediate techniques that help with the advanced ones are: understanding how base coats interact with the paints you put on top, brush control and having a solid understanding of light sources. I certainly would never discourage anyone from having a go, but if you haven’t quite figured out the above, you are setting yourself up to fail. And then get disheartened and probably get fed up, you know how it goes.  You are after all trying to paint an illusion, a ‘trompe l’oeil’ (deceive the eye). You are trying to make a piece of 3d moulded plastic look like a piece of metal, without using metallic paints (paint which has flecks of actual metal in it).  You also have to remember th...

 Following on from my last post you should now be ready for filling any gaps and priming your model.  Vaelia Arra - Copyright White Werewolf Taven I would always recommend dry fitting parts first before gluing, to make sure everything fits properly. With 3D prints, especially the larger ones, they are often multi-part kits, which have all been cured separately and can shrink and move, meaning some joints don't always connect the way they should.  Some joins may need trimming to ensure a good fit so make sure you're happy everything fits before applying the glue. I tend to use a good strong superglue, Gorilla Gel glue works well for me, but you may have something else you prefer. If a join is going to need gap filling, I will tend to leave the glue to dry for an hour or so before I fill any gaps. You don't want the part snapping off whilst you are in the middle of filling any gaps! Resin can be pinned and is recommended if the join isn't that big.  For small gaps I wi...

Well, it's been a while since I last posted a blog, about a year I think! But I've been thinking about doing a series for beginners for sometime. Going through from start to finish working on a larger model project. There won't be any special advanced techniques here, just base coat, blending, glazing, layering etc. all the basics to lay the foundation down for those later advance ones. There may be a bit of colour mixing and going back to some of my other tutorials, like painting skin with 4 colours.  The main point of this series is to enable you to jump in at any point - so if you already know how to clean and build models, but just want a hand with painting then just skip ahead! So for this project I have decided to use Vaelia Arra, a 75mm model sculpted by White Werewolf Tavern. If you haven't already go check out their stuff, they do some amazing sculpts! Image copyright White Werewolf Tavern I mainly purchase my 3d prints from Etsy as there are a lot of merchants...

As I am currently unable to get hold of a webcam due to them being snapped up by everyone working from home, I thought I would try and do a blog post on how I paint skin. Following up on my earlier post on the technical side of things with the Sara bust I painted, this is how I go about it.  Using the troggoths that I have been painting recently my process can be summed up in a few steps:  1) lay down a good base coat, in the troggs case, this was Celestial Grey 2) sketch in the shadows     This is probably one of the main steps. As this is where I establish where my shadows and highlights are going to go and will set me up for the rest of the painting.  Using my own mix of Navy Blue ( scale colour), Naggroth Night and Magos Purple, I sketched in where I wanted the shadows to be:  As you can see this stage is pretty messy, as I'm using a very thinned paint in order to establish the values I need on the mini. Don't feel disheartened at this point as you...

I'm hoping to do a series of tips, taken from the do's and don'ts blog I did a little while ago, with the aim of expanding further on them with an in depth look to help new and establish painters. Who knows, they might prove useful to you! Getting to know your paints So, you've just gone out and bought a tonne of paints and want to crack on with your painting. That's great, however... just a word of warning, that red you bought may not be the colour you thought it was. In fact, that red has purple in it and purple isn't what you wanted in your colour scheme.  It may seem like something you wouldn't need to consider but unless you are buying a primary colour, secondary, tertiary colours are made up of lots of other colours. Half the time to me, it just seems like an illusion to appease our eyesight.  Even black can be made up of brown or blue or purple, because those are their core mixtures. White as well, will usually have blue in it because that makes a bri...