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The Medium I personally find the blended fibers medium by Liquitex to be a highly versatile medium. It can be added to any ground mixture to add the appearance of natural roots and similar debris. In this tutorial I will be looking at how to make an ice base using it. It is important to remember that in most cases the ice is hardly crystal clear and instead it generally appears cloudy white. The blended fibbers have a slight translucency which allows for the illusion of depth, while each fiber acts like a crack in the ice. The Ice Step 1: Base colour Use a dark base. Then tint it with the colour you want. In this case I used Cerulean Blue. This step can be skipped if you are going to be tinting the medium instead (thought a darker base colour is still advised) Step 2: Apply Fiber Medium Slather on a large dollop of medium. You can add some colour to tint it, but the colour will change significantly as it dries so be carful to not overpower it (you don't even need to mix it well as streaking colours may be desired). Transparent colours work better for tinting if you still want to retain the depth. In this case I did not tint it. Step 3: Smooth the Medium I did this by wetting a pallet knife and running it over the surface, followed by cleaning up the edges. The Fiber medium is extremely easy to smooth with a wet pallet knife. The thickness decides how much translucency the final product has. Step 4: Let it Dry In this case I liked how it looked so I decided not to dry brush it with white. Drybrushing with white would make it look more frosty. This took a couple hours for me, mostly due to the thickness I chose. You can see how the blue is showing in the photo, that is the undercoat peaking through. The Snow Step 1: Snow Mix some medium with Titanium white. This will make a nice snow texture Step 2: Applying Snow Apply the snow and feather it out with a brush, the feathering out makes it look more realistic. If you don't want peaks use water to smooth the snow (unless you want peaks to represent sticks in the snow.) Step 3: Let it Dry The base is now finished. The Miniature Put a miniature on it. Thats what a base is for. Unless you want to use it as a trap in DnD or some terrain.

Hi folks, The new Deepstar Kraken model is coming out soon for DeepWars and I painted up this one for display using a lot of inks and liquid acrylics. This model (not really a miniature when this big) was done in different stages. The base painting was done with blue skin and light tentacles. The mantle and top of the tentacles were given two washes of Marine Blue (Ultramarine) liquid acrylics (Dr. Phil Martins brand) mixed with matte medium and water. When the first was dry, the second was applied. The underside of the tentacles was done with a mix of Cerulean Blue ink (Liquitex) + white paint + Matte medium and water. After removing from the base, as it was making it difficult to reach the bottom of the tentacles, I applied many light blue glazes (Cerulean Blue + Ultramarine Blue + White) for highlights and some dark (Ultramarine Blue) glazes for shadows. The goal was to make the blending mostly smooth but not to go overboard and spend too long on it. The reason will become clear soon. The next stage was the big one. Dots of blue-green, green, yellow-green, white and various shades of orange and Burnt Umber were applied to the mantle and tentacles. This was done using Liquitex inks and Phil Martin liquid acrylics to make sure the dots were very pure in color and, more importantly, flowed evenly off the end of the brush, which was held and used like a pen. After the dots had dried, glazes of inks colors were applied, yellow-green to the mantle and tips of tentacles and bright orange to the “face”. When this dried, more dots were applied over them and highlights were applied to some of the dots using a bit of white or yellow mixed into the ink. The eyes were done with yellow liquid acrylic mixed with white, black, and a bit of blue as the base. It was highlighted with more white and a touch of yellow. The black iris was painted, then more white highlights were applied around it to clean it up. Finally, the big highlight was added at the top with thinned white. The eyes were not painted as gems (bright bottom, dark top with hot-spot secular reflection) here as the light was meant to be diffused by the water. Maybe next time. The base was done with washes of Burnt Sienna ink first, then washes of Pthalho blue and Marine Blue ink to darken the rocks. it was all drybrushed with Americana brand Buttermilk, then some glazes of greens, magentas and purples were added to the sponges and corals. The barnacles were drybrushed with some white to make them stand out.

The WIP is here: A little less see-through than I'd like, but the light still passes. There is glow in the dark medium used, but it's not very effective, and would never come into play anyway.

I had so much fun with my slimes I decided to do a few more translucent minis I had handy. These are the Grave Wraith and Nightspectre (somewhere else I have a Ghostly Summons 77095, Labella DeMornay 77096, and a spare Spirit 77098 that I will paint another time). I wanted to do these quickly, so it's ink mostly - the same ones as with the slimes, plus maybe a few darker phthalos. I've done a coat of glow in the dark medium for each (photographed), a coat of the not highest green, and picked out the skeletons in the nightspectre with a wash of medium and brown liner and base coated the grave wraith's sword and tombstone in a dark blue-grey. not photographed Eventually everything will get a drybrush of spectral glow (and maybe another, mixed with maggot white, in a few spots). For the nightspectre, I'm going to try and treat it as a fire and get darker going out. With the wraith, I'm going to go lighter out from the bottom centre. Plus highlights for both. The goal will be for them to be mostly translucent (and glow in the dark, because everything gets that medium). Hopefully I'll figure out how much direct light, and how much medium I need to be able to photograph this. Photos later today in subsequent posts.

Over in the Show Off section, I made an offhand remark about winning my war with metallic paint. A couple of replies came in asking how I did it. I decided, instead of letting it get buried in Show Off, I would put my answer in Painting Tips & Advice. So a little background, in 2007 I took a true metals class with Jeramie Bonamont-Teboul. After that class I discovered more articles on CMoN about the technique. At first I was toddling along perfectly happy living with the RMS metallic paints, but my skills were improving and I was discovering that the RMS metallics had some problems. Now in the steel colors the problems aren’t as pronounced but the gold triads and bright silvers were a nightmare. The main problem I was having was with dilution. Thinner paints make for smoother coats, but when you thin RMS metallic paints with water the pigment falls out of solution in minutes. The effect makes the metallic look less shiny and clouded, and therefore defeats the purpose of using the metallic paint. It also makes the metallic look grittier and less like a solid piece of metal. I asked Anne, a year ago, about this and she verified this is a known effect of metallic paints in general. The fix is to just use the metallic paints straight from the bottle. However, the fix doesn’t fix the graininess issue of using undiluted paints. I thought this was an RMS issue so I started playing with metallic paints from other companies and discovered that Anne was correct. This is a general issue with metallic paints. This issue explains why many high end painters opt to paint Non Metallic Metal. I had just about given up on metallic paint when a month ago, while airbrushing, I discovered the fix. I was airbrushing Liquitex soft body Payne’s Grey on a model as the foundation color. Liquitex recommends using their Airbrush Medium to thin their soft body paints for airbrush use. I love their Airbrush Medium because everything stays in solution. That is when I had my “ah ha” moment. I wrapped up my project, and mixed the Liquitex Airbrush Medium with RMS New Gold on my palette. Success! I could even thin for thin glazing layers. Once the dilution problem was conquered the chalky metallic highlights quickly resolved because now I could mix RMS Pearl White in with the base color metallic in exact amounts or I could bump colors using other colors on the triad. The metallic paint even flows better from the brush so no more clumpiness or gritty paint layers. So now that it is too late I’ll say, “The long and the short of it is: use Liquitex Airbrush Medium to thin your metallic paints.”

This is a quick post - pics will follow shortly from my phone. You can see the WIP with recipe and process pics by clicking on the link back there.

In between base coats of glow in the dark medium for specter #2 I decided to unwrap and quick paint the slimes with ink. What follows is, to my belief, THE green slime recipe.

Today, I have a bit of time. Not enough to really paint, but enough to do something that may be useful to me AND to other forum-ites. A week or so ago I bought those Badger Freak Flex translucent paints. I already had a bunch (but not all of) the Reaper Clear paints, and a few liquitex acrylic artist inks. I'm going to do a comparison on some paper. I think straight up, and then below 1:1 with matte medium In all I think it's about 20 colours, and I'll try to keep stuff clearly defined by brand and color. I suppose doing this over something like newsprint would be better, but I don't have any handy. Hopefully I'll be posting results later. If not, in the next few days. I'll update later with a full list of the colors I'm using, but in the meantime, if you have requests/suggestions within reason... please post them below.

I recently got a set of Liquitex inks as an early Christmas gift. It came with 6 different colors that I plan on making washes out of. However, one of the colors is titanium white, could I make a wash out of white? What could a white wash be used for? Are there other fun things I can do with these that isn't limited to making washes? I know very little about inks in general so any other advice on how to use them would be great.

I seal my miniatures with Liquitex High Gloss Varnish through an airbrush and then do a matte coat. Last year, I put a number of figures away sealed with gloss but did not get around to putting a matte coat on them. Figures were primed with Badger Stynylrez, had several paint brands used on them and washed with an ink/liquitex medium/flow improver/slow dri home made mix. Some of these figures were Reaper Bones, some were not. They were all kept in a display case that, while not airproof, does keep dust out and is not in direct sunlight. The metal, resin and hard plastic figures have cured just fine and are not sticky at all. Even the bases of the bones figures, which are green stuff or plastic are not sticky. Only the bones figures themselves have become tacky. Some are barely sticky, some are so sticky I can press my finger to them and life the figure up without fear of it falling. I don't know when the problem happened, but the figures were sealed at various points last year and some had no issues for at least weeks after being sealed. Other bones painted at the time that were not sealed do not have this issue. The problem seems to be some kind of reaction with the bones material and the liquitex high gloss varnish that happens through the primer/paint. I've only read up on issues with them becoming tacky when aerosols that react with the bones material. I'm concerned if I matte them, the tackyness will just come through again. I had some issues with the same problem with Liquitex High Gloss and bones a few years ago when I started using it. After some change in application/use I eventually got it to work without issue (or at least with no immediate issue.) Has anyone else experienced your bones becoming tacky months after being sealed with no issues beforehand? Any idea why it is happening or if there is something I can do to fix and/or prevent it?

So which of these blue spray paints would you use on a rather large Tardis model? http://www.liquitex.com/us/shop/paints/professional/spray-paint/36093/