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...