zemjw

There are masking sheets that you could try. Critical Mass Games do some, including digitial patterns. I have some, although haven't tried them yet.

One small cleaning tip is not to point the airbrush at your face as you're trying to fix in the cup/bottle (my Paasche has a small side fitting cup). I did this over the holidays with the cup full of vallejo cleaner and accidently hit the trigger. Fortunately I pushed the trigger down, rather than down and back, which just resulted in an impromptu glaucoma test. I still washed my eyes out for over a minute, just to be on the safe side

One thing I have found useful when painting 54mm figures is to wear a cotton glove on my hand that's holding the model. As well as looking cool it stops fingerprints and oil being transferred to the figure. Granted, I do occasionally have to remove bits of thread, but that's much less work than fixing the damage caused by oil from my hands. I'm not sure how big your figures are, but there are work holders you can get with a handle underneath, that are very useful for bigger figures

I did this using FW acrylic artists inks - Silver Pearl and Flame Red to be precise - http://www.daler-rowney.com/content/fw-artists-inks I was quite happy with the result, although they might not be as dark as you want. There are some pictures in one of my blog posts at http://zemjw.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/finished-dwarf-adventurers.html Vallejo (possibly Reaper, not sure) do a metallic medium, although I haven't had much success with it.

I use a piece of glass from a photo frame, 6" x 4". I taped the edges to avoid green stuff becoming red stuff and covered half of it with cling film. The bulk of the putty sits on the cling film, and I have a flat surface on the glass to work with the piece I need. I also have a sheet of white A3 paper underneath everything, as it makes it much easier to find bits of green stuff that try to escape

I don't actually remember when I had fewer than 20 unpainted figures lying about I use these drawers to store the unboxed figures, but plastics etc. are generally left in their boxes and crammed into a cupboard. You sure be aware, however, of the danger of painting all your figures. Just to be on the safe side, you should buy some more as soon as possible

If you're in the UK http://miniature-heroes.co.uk/ has Reaper figures

I have used Daler Rowney pearescent ink with some success, although I haven't tried it with white. I tend to mix the colour I want with the pearlescent silver. The mace and chainmail on the dwarf below were done using this technique and there's a bit more on the method I used at the bottom of this post.

There's a video by Miniature Mentor that covers this (or something similar) - "The art of speed painting" by Thomas David, although they call it "zenithal highlighting". I've been meaning to try it, but have never quite got around to it.

Never one to miss the opportunity to push my blog visitor numbers into single digits I did a couple of posts on making bases for these figures that bring them up to a more usable size (the search returns them in the wrong order, so scroll down for the first post). They'll never be great figures, but at least they don't look quite so out of place with the taller bases. It's also worth spending 5 minutes with clippers on them - remove random arms and legs to give a bit of variety

@Heisler - hadn't realised that - it popped up fresh in the RSS feed, so I just assumed... That'll teach me to do stuff before caffeine on a Monday morning Back to lurk mode for me

There's a whole forum dedicated to mini sculpture - http://www.minisculpture.co.uk/index.php?action=forum Lots of good sculptors on there - but I'm most deinitely not amongst them

Coat d'Arms paints can be ordered from http://www.gladiator.clara.net/coatd.htm. From that page, Brookhurst hobbies are the American distributor, so that may be your best bet. Good luck

There are a couple of things I use to cut circles in plasticard. The first is a compass cutter amazon.co.uk link. It's very flexible as you can set any radius you want. It's then just a case of patience as it can take a few minutes to cut each one. I've used it on plasticard up to 1mm thick without any problem (although I had to turn the card over to cut through from the other side as well). I did try it on 2mm thick plasticard, but it wouldn't cut the whole way through, and even cutting from the other side didn't really work. A thing I picked up recently is a punch that will cut 25mm (1") holes (other sizes and shapes are available). They're sold as craft punches, so you should be able to find them in art shops (where I got mine). I've used them on textured plasticard 0.6mm thick, and they're a lot quicker than the compass (and you don't have the hole in the middle from the compass point). The problem is that they only cut the one size. The hole in a 30mm base is about 22mm, so the punch would be slightly too big. I'd definitely recommend a compass cutter as part of the toolbox