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Hi all! If you'd like to add further customization to your model with decorated miniature bases...here: 'An Introduction to printing miniatures bases with a resin printer'📚 An easy-to-follow guide containing all the simple step to print round & smooth miniature bases. Plus, Freebies to download, check for their orientation and support configuration to learn how to support your own models. Let me know what do you think 😊

So I was asked to do a step by step tutorial on how I did the rust on my Wyrmgear [located here: http://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/56248-77177-rusty-wyrmgear/ ] so this morning I did just that with three of my Secret Weapon bases from my Bag O' Crap. I hope you find it useful! Here's the three I chose, washed and ready to be painted. Six paints are used [pictured] and two brush sizes [pictured] So first I cover them in brown liner and let that dry Next, I dab at it with my Ancient Bronze. Throughout this whole tutorial, I dab with my brushes. It's a bit rough on the brushes, I recommend using slightly ratty ones you don't mind getting a bit worse. I dab using the side of the bristles, not the ends, but it still is a bit rough on the brush. You don't want to entirely cover the base, but do a decent amount of area in bronze. you'll cover most of it up later, but it gives you a brighter surface to put rust on than the brown liner. I did varying degrees of bronze on the three bases Now you'll add your base rust on the bases, using an orange. I used Lava Orange. Again, i dabbed with my brush. I find it gives a more organic and sporadic feel than brushing the paint on. You'll want to leave the underlying colors visible in areas. This is all about layering the colors to make a glorious mess of colors now you add some dark areas to your rust. I found Bloodstain Red to be great for this! You'll again want to leave areas of orange peeking through. Don't be afraid to use a paper towel and wipe at areas of your base as you go, to get a gritty or smeared look. I did this heavily on the smallest [middle] base below Now I go back over some areas with the Lava Orange to bring out a bit of brighter spots that got covered up too much by the red Now we're going to use a metallic silver, in my case Shadowed Steel, to give a hint of underlying, un-rusted metal beneath that rust. You'll put this over the areas that you left the rust off of, where the dark brown liner is still visible. Don't be afraid if you end up doing too much silver, you can go back over it easily to rust it up. Even though you're actually putting this ON TOP of the rust colors, when you dab with your brush the contrast of shiny to not shiny will make it look underneath, like so: Now we use the small brush that I haven't touched yet for this tutorial. Yellow will add some realistic color to the orangey red rust, but you don't want too much. My yellow doesn't like to put out paint so i have to take the cap off and dip my brush in the cap, so I usually end up with a thick yellow. I deal with this by wiping it gently with a paper towel after dabbing small amounts onto the bases This is a touch up step, where you apply small amounts of orange and red. I did this because I felt that the effect I wanted wasn't completely there, and i needed some more rust over the silver. At this point, I'm rather unhappy with the manhole cover, because it's complicated, textured surface is making it difficult to get the effect I want We pull back out the Ancient Bronze now, to add some shiny rust effect to the duller rust. You can note the difference especially on the manhole cover We use the brown liner again! We're nearing completion. I use the brown liner to imitate dirt, shadows, and to get detail to pop. I put it into the detailed areas of my Wyrmgear's base, the cracks in the metal for example, and wipe away the excess to leave only the dark gap filled We go back to the yellow, because I felt that i had gone too dark again. I went a bit heavy with the yellow on the man hole cover, especially the letters, in an attempt to bring the color up a bit. We're done now, save for some small steps I used Pure Black to go around the edges to cover the paint strokes and to give it a neat look. This actually helped the manhole cover immensely, I think Final sealant coat! I love how sealing them brings the colors out. We're done! I hope everyone finds this tutorial useful for doing heavily rusted bases/miniatures! You can easily adapt this to do less-rusted stuff by increasing the amount of visible metal underneath =) Look up pictures of rust, it's very useful. Rust is so colorful, there is so much variation in it, and my frustration with my Wyrmgear that resulted in me painting him rusty was a boon in disguise because I hadn't realized just how much fun rust was to paint and how beautiful it can be

So I was asked to do a tutorial on how I painted the marble on my Coraldrax [seen here: http://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/54577-coraldrax-sea-kaladrax/ ] like I did with my tutorial on painting rust: http://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/56249-siris-guide-to-painting-rust/ So here we go! This isn't going to be as good as my rust tutorial I think, it's using acrylics [since that's how I did it on Coraldrax, and I wanted to show how I did that] and really on Coraldrax it's barely visible underneath him, so I didn't worry about doing a pretty job with it. However, I think it can easily be done with hobby paints instead of craft, and be done much nicer than the way I do it, by using the same basics as i'll show below So I decided to use two flat surfaces, which are two half objective markers from my Secret Weapon Bag O' Crap and another base from the same Bag O' Crap that could pull off the marble look and actually has texture The colors I use are white, a light gray, a medium gray, and a very very dark green called Wrought Iron. I have black there as well, but I didn't use it My first step is to cover them completely in the medium gray color Then you use white and streak in the same direction. I usually go from one corner to the opposite corner. Don't be worried if the lines are fuzzy or blotchy or thick. Marble is seldom symmetrical and perfect, and this is just the base coat you're applying Now I break out my light grey and do the same thing, streaking in the same direction. This helps clean up your white lines a bit, and blend them a bit better so it's not so stark This next step will look very messy. Don't get discouraged! You're going to use a very small brush and your dark color. In my case, that is Wrought Iron. Your'e going to make spidery veins in the same direction as your streaking [you will notice I screwed up on one of my objective markers and went against the streaks >.< ] You'll want to dip your brush often, because plenty of paint means it doesn't get fuzzy edges. We want lots of crisp lines Now you'll go back to your light grey and white. I tend to mix them in even parts, and then dry brush it over the entire thing. At this stage, you don't HAVE to follow the streaking, but I still do anyways just because. This makes the veins fade Using pure white, we streak once more. Be careful not to entirely cover up your faded veins of dark color Now you're going to apply dark veins once more. You'll want them very thin, very crisp. If you look at pictures of marble, you'll see plenty of them have both faded and crisp lines through them And you're done! A final seal gets us our final marble look. As I said, a bit messy, a bit imperfect...but I'm sure with this tutorial you can get the basic marble look down and then improve on my own technique =) Finished markers: Finished little base:

Hey all, some people were talking about wanting to enter into this area of the Reapercon contest but weren't sure how to get some good effects. I've got some experience in vehicles, I don't always do a WIP for everything I paint, and figure lets get a discussion going to help people figure out what they want and how to do it. I'll start off by saying I'm more familiar with weathering and I don't have any real experience with an airbrush (though that will change this weekend as my compressor arrives tomorrow) so in some areas I'm going to be more helpful then others. First off let me start with an awesome free resource I had forgotten about. The weathering magazine released a free "Best of" online mag last December and it has some great articles on basic rust, worn chipping and mud (which I've never done) so this is a great read. http://issuu.com/ammomigjimenez/docs/weathering_greatest_hits?e=12622886%2F10329229 Also Painting Buddha just did one on painting a warjack that can be helpful but it looks like there will be a few weeks until it makes it out to the community college (ie free). I'm going to start about a few basic techniques that I think can be used for any paint style then move onto how I do chipping and worn paint without salt or other specialty paints. Probably won't have any pictures but if people really need some I can get to that over the next few weeks. I have a few dust vehicles I picked up on the cheap over black Friday that I've been saving for when I get an airbrush. Basic Techniques ---Defining the machine. 1) Oil Washes --- So one of the hard things to do, without an airbrush, is get good gradients and contrast going on certain vehicles. How they reflect light and the large flat surfaces in general are tricky so it's hard to really define the various part of the vehicle like one would with a human. Also you generally don't paint a vehicle 10 different colors and there's much less range in the colors you do use. One thing you can do, that I got from the guy behind Kallamity, is to use a wash of pure black oil paint. This may seam crazy but oil and acrylic work just fine together--I've been doing it for about a year now and the Massive voodoo people have for longer then me. The reason for oil is, well, the blacks in oil are just 10x blacker then what we can get in acrylic. Also oil washes are way, way more fluid then acrylic washes so they flow right into the ridges and lines and stay there without staining the rest of the paint -- they're quite easy to use. If you dilute the oil paint enough they dry pretty quick too (less then 30min). You'll want to several washes but it will really define all the separate parts in a way you can't otherwise. 2) Pigments -- Pigments can be used two ways. To quick shade and to make the machine look like it lives in a world. There's a great article on Warsen.al's blog about painting one of their terrain pieces where pigments are used for the shading. I would link but it would violate forum rules so you'll need to search for it yourself. This can be a great way to shade a large surface but pigments can be a bit tricky to use as it's very easy to get too much on your brush and then you've got something way harsher then you wanted (and cleaning them can be a pain). I tend to only do this on the undersides where you're prone to have darker shades and, possibly more dirt, as it's a great way to add a final shade without much work. The second application for pigments is really more a discussion on it's own. Weathering ---Quick weathering tip 1) Dry Mud -- Got this from massive voodoo. Some of you have the crackle paints that I used for ice. Well just paint it earth tone and you've got some very dry mud. The non-clear paints are more durable so I suggest the white. -- Chipping effects Let me start out by saying I love the chipping solutions from AK Interactive (MIG also makes a line but I haven't tried them but they're probably easier to get) as it makes the process below require less of a soft hand. But you don't need them. I have not tried salt and hairspray but it's clear you can get some good results--but read up on it first as only certain hairsprays really work. First off here's a wooden Tori I used this technique on to make. You can also use this to do heavy rust (though you'll probably want more colors) This shot was after I added pigments into the rust effect Without using a chipping solution it's very easy to accidently take off more paint then you expected (as well as some primer) but that's OK as you can use that opportunity to add in some slight color variation to show faded paint, repaints (that don't match) or various shades of rust. What you'll need is the following: 1) and old tooth brush. I've got one where the front 1/3rd of the brush is kept a the same length and the back 2/3rds have been cut half way down. I suggest a soft or medium brush. 2) and underpaint. This will be the metal or the figurative primer--machines will have a primer between the paint and metal so we'll represent that with a different color. If I'm doing TMM I'll use a metal color I like. If not I'll do a dark gray. Temperature of the gray is up to you, choose to best to fit the desired mood of the piece. 3) (Optional) a second undercoat. You can do a metallic then the aforementioned figurative primer. 4) Hot water. You'll want this after your paint coats have dried. The warmer the better as warm water will break up the acrylic paint bonds and help you scrub it off. Steps: 1) Paint your base layer. You may want to do a few coats of this as it's easy to take this layer off ---which generally we don't want. This layer will be your figurative primer or TMM color. If you're doing do separate undercoats now is where you do it. 2) Paint your paint layer. 3) Depending on where you live let the paint dry some. The longer you wait the harder to get off. I normally wait 20-30 min (I live in a desert). 4) get your tooth brush and dip in the warm water and scrub away. Be warned that at first It will seam like nothing is coming off but then a little will followed by a lot. Use the longer, and thus less pressure applied, part of your brush for a more gentle scrub that will take off less. The shorter bristles will take more off quicker. Generally it takes me about 20 seconds of scrubbing to get the effect you want but the majority of it is in how warm the water is plus how much force you apply. That's basically it. Feel free to ask questions or just form a general discussion on how to paint machines as I'm more then certain there's more then just me with some tips to share. I'll post some more guides here as I have time based off of people's question.

Don't know what happened to Doug's Miniature Photography 101 thread that was in here, but I feel this is a very valid thing to have in this area. Found this today while surfing the web and thought it'd be very useful for a lot of us who try to take pics of our figures: TUTORIAL: BEGINNERS GUIDE TO MINIATURE PHOTOGRAPHY