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I'm painting flesh tones and it's coming out blotchy. Any suggestions on how to get those buttery smooth blends? The specific reaper color is "Rosy Flesh." I'm mixing the paint with water to thin it down but I get rings and blotches. Too much water? Too little? Should I be using flow improver instead of water? Should I paint everything the highlight color and darken it or work the reverse direction? Thanks!

Hey there, I'm very new to sculpting, and i was hoping for some advice in removing the "seams" that show up when you add a new blob of greenstuff onto your model, I've been using Vaseline, and a small slightly rounded steel dental tool for the bulk of my sculpt, i can get most of the height difference to go away, but the seam is still visible, I'm mostly trying to blend it into other soft green stuff underneath it, i don't have too much trouble blending a soft layer into a cured layer, any advice, tips or techniques Also, I appreciate all the great tips I've already found on the forum, its saved me from having to do a lot of trial and error on my own

WARNING! HERE THERE BE SECRET SOPHIE SPOILERS! YE HAVE BEEN WARNED!! Please excuse the crappy phone pictures. It was all I had at the time. I now have access to my mother's camera (my digital is broken) but there are delays getting pictures from it to the computer. Note: Some of the images are sideways, but if you right click and open in a new tab, they show correctly. Don't know why this is happening... So here it is, the WIP of my Secret Sophie. It is taking me a while, but that's because I'm putting a lot of work into it. There are a lot of pictures included as I've been taking them along the way, so you can see the progress. The first thing I did when I received the information on my partner was look up their profile and started looking over their own work and some of their comments. I needed 1) An idea of what kind of mini to do, since they weren't super-clear and 2) What kind of color scheme they'd like. One color seemed to jump out from many of their comments, and that color is what inspired my color scheme. So blame my partner. But before I had a color scheme, I had to peruse the Reaper catalog for what mini to paint. A few jumped out at me, and some of them were purchased and will be included in the final box (so they can paint them up), but I finally had a mini that struck me with a very clear image in my head: Along with this mini I wanted a tree. Not just any tree, I needed a tree that was spooky and hanging with Spanish moss, so off to the interwebz! So I had my pictures. But... now what? Well, I decided I wanted the tree up high and the figure lower and a stream of water in between. I had my layout. Toss in some old gravestones, and I was set. Off to my Reaper Order! But... tree. Where was I going to get a tree? Then I remembered recently reading a post by Corporea about tree sculpting. So off to ask questions via PM. First attempt: Too small. So... before I even put greenstuff on it, I made a new armature. Better! So off I went. While I was busy sculpting the tree, I was also painting the mini... Then I started looking at all my paints. I finally settled on these: So I needed to do my base colors... With the initial blocking in done, it's down to blending... Then I started freaking out that my colors weren't contrasty enough. That's when I did the black and white image shown before of the colors. Satisfied there was enough contrast, I moved on. Here is where I am currently: Still not done, but hope to provide regular updates here as I move along. Comments and suggestions on this are greatly appreciated as so far this is my best work. I have a lot of cork I'll be using to build up the base, along with all sorts of basing supplies I've been collecting and water effects for the stream. I was going to mount it on a tile, but have been reconsidering as of late onto a plinth. Here's what I've had: Hope you enjoy the ride with me the rest of the way! Note: Going to try and fix the sideways picture issue... don't know why that's happening...

I'm working on shading and highlighting and having a bit of trouble with smaller areas, like muscles. Any tips/advice? Also, tips on taking good pics of minis are welcome.

EDITED: I tried to fix the pics since the originals were on photobucket. Apologies if they're a bit off! Ok, face painters! Have you always wondered how to get nice smooth skin blend? I'm going to do my best to take you step by step through a face. I could probably be persuaded to also move on to other skin areas, but let's start simple. Now, while snapping photos I realized this blending is not going to be as neat and clean as I usually like it because the photoing process did interfere with a few layers. But, we'll get it smooth in the end! Are you ready?! First things first: A large model, to better illustrate what we're doing! And our materials. We have Yephima, cloud giantess, a W&N #2, and RMS paint! I used fair skin as my flesh color, and I'm going to shade with porcelain rose and spattered crimson and highlight with pure white. This should give us a nice warm flesh tone. I'll also use walnut brown on the eyes. After snapping this, I also realized I wanted blue eyes- so I added ashen blue for the iris. Porcelain is a retired color. You can sub punk rock pink or just mix spattered with white and it'll work just fine. But I had it, and I like it, and if I keep using it, maybe reaper will bring it back! 1. Step 1: basecoat the face with fair skin. Hey! My model has a little face blemish! Oh no! What can I do to fix this? Never fear, face painters! Just take a little bit of brush-on sealer and cover the blemish with a nice layer, and it will smooth out. You can then put another layer of basecoat on top. I did a total of 3 layers of flesh, mainly because I forgot to wash this model and I had some adherence issues on the chest. 2. Step 2: The eyes! Line with walnut. Doesn't have to be perfect. You can always touch up with flesh. Paint the sclera white. Pure white probably isn't as good as linen or leather white, but I'm trying to limit our palette. Add the iris- ashen blue, as you can see. Here's where we pick the direction of gaze and try to make the eye "look" in the same direction. Takes some practice to figure our what works and what you like. Again, if paint goes where you don't want it, just touch up. Hmmn... I could have sworn I took one with just the blue... at any rater, after the blue is down add the walnut brown pupil. Then dot the pupil with white. Sorry, that back eye is hard to see. Usually there's an easy eye and a hard eye. Some people start with the hard eye. I start with the easy eye, so at least one will look the way I want! 3. Step 3: Breathe. Don't forget to breath again now that the eyes are done! 4. Step 4: Shading. This is a lot messier because I'm pausing to photo- sorry! First I lay down a thin glaze of spattered crimson all the way to the edge of the walnut, then clean the brush and just smooth the edge out using a damp brush and some feathering type strokes. Thin is better. See how nice and translucent this layer is? You can easily see the flesh underneath. I went back in with a thin glaze of my flesh to reclaim some of that cheekbone from the shadow. Then proceeded to put some crimson on the side of the nose and smooth it out. I really tried to catch each specific step. But- you can see how thin the layer is, then how it smooths with a damp brush. I usually do a few layers of this and reclaim my flesh with a thin glaze if I feel I have too much shadow tone. The crimson will mesh nicely with the walnut so that it looks like she has nice intense Maybelline lashes! Er- probably don't want quite this much contrast with a male face. If I were doing this on a male model, I'd pick something like ruddy brown to line the eyes. More soon!

Hey All, I'm finally happy enough with this one to call it finished. This was my first real attempt at blending, and while there is a bit of stepping in some places I think the piece is still better for the attempt. I do wish the surface texture was a bit smoother in some places. Perhaps I need to clean my minis better before starting. All comments and criticism are very welcome.

One of my more recent techniques I'm starting to use more is wet blending on cloaks. I'm getting ready to use this on a paladin's red cloak (Isabeau from Reaper's metal line). I'm worried about coverage. Traditionally when I paint red, I undercoat with a medium brown to help smooth the coverage. Would it make sense to undercoat with brown, wet blend brown and then wet blend red over top of it or just jump in and wet blend the red without an undercoat? I would appreciate any experience or insight the hivemind could share.

So I was commenting on one of Willen's threads and promised I'd post some of my thoughts on blending. Feathering is one of the primary blending techniques I use, and the below is the basic gist of it. Keep in mind that this is a really quick and dirty tut, so it's not the prettiest painting I've ever done, but it should get the idea across. The basic technique comes from the class I took from Rhonda Bender (Wren) at Reapercon 2013. Anything useful you find here should be credited to her; anything that totally destroys your paintjob should be blamed on my poor understanding of her techniques. (And Rhonda, please feel free to correct/suggest/etc if you see this!) I'm painting on a Bones Bathalian figure. My paints are all RMS: Military Grey (HD), Ghost White and Nightmare Black. First up: the basecoat. It's just a few smooth layers of Military Grey built up to an appropriate opacity/saturation. Next, the first layer of feathering. I'm using about a 50/50 mix of Ghost White and water to make this layer: I'm using much starker gradients than usual so the technique is very apparent; if you look at the top fold in this photo, you can see an initial layer that I would normally put down (it's Concrete Grey, I think, from the HD line), but it's subtle enough you can't see the brushstrokes...which is the idea, but doesn't help illustrate the idea. As you can see, the brushstrokes are perpendicular to the peak of the fold. You can also think of this in relation to the gradient, to the direction of dark to light. If your gradient is bands of color in order from dark to light, the feathering stroke runs perpendicular to those bands of color. This was the most counterintuitive part of what Rhonda taught us, but it is well worth the brain-bending! The stroke starts as close to the "dark" as it can (without losing the midtone) and pulls up to the brightest peak. In the photo above, the brushstroke moves upward. The reason for this is that paint tends to leave the brush at the end of the stroke more than at the beginning, so your featherstroke is naturally creating a gradient by concentrating the pigment at the top of the fold. With fairly gentle folds like these, you'll do this from both sides of the fold (with pleats, or heavy creases, you'll only use one side, usually, since the other side of the peak is in deep shadow). Here's an image of the same layer: There are strokes from left to right and from right to left, meeting at the peak of the fold (shown in the inset by the red line; this is the line that will end up with the most light). Next, I do the same thing for the shadows. Again, about a 50/50 mix of water and paint, this time with Nightmare Black. Brushstrokes still move toward the point of greatest pigment (for shadows, that's the deepest part of the fold). SO, at this point, things look pretty rough. So what's next? Next is a glaze. I mix about a 70/30 water/basecoat puddle of color and smoothly cover the whole area. In a lot of ways, this is like a wash, but I want to wick enough off my brush before touching the mini that it brushes off rather than pooling. I want to cover the whole area, both shadow and light, with a unifying, nearly transparent, layer of the basecoat color. Here you can see the Ghost White has been knocked down quite a bit and the Nightmare Black has come up a bit. The feather-strokes are starting to fade into the midtone. I may apply several layers of the glaze at this point, and I may apply it in specific places rather than globally, until I have a smooth look. Next, I'll go back in with the highlight and pull it up again, this time in a smaller area than before: The glaze down/pull back up may happen several times, depending on how smooth I want it. Generally, the more times you glaze and reapply, the smoother your gradient will get. I'll do this with the shadows, too, of course. Other fun tricks are using a glaze that isn't your midtone to globally shift the color a bit, for example giving a basic grey a hint of teal, or skewing the shadows of a blue into purple. Also, once you get used to making tiny brushstrokes like this technique requires, playing with the kind of rough-woven textures that Derek frequently uses gets easier. For some examples of this technique fully realized, I invite you to check out these paintjobs of mine. I'm not a master by any stretch, but these have all been painted with my understanding of the technique. Charnel Grub - My low-to-mid display level. Deathstalker - Armypainting. Meant to be high-contrast to show up well on the table. Phoenicia - Near-competition quality. She was at Reapercon '14 and was nearly the piece the judges looked at, so I'm guessing she would have picked up either a Certificate or a Bronze if I'd just entered her (the piece they did pick brought a silver). I hope this has been useful to someone. If anyone has questions or comments please feel free. Specific to Willen: we were talking about wet-blending and 2-Brush Blending in your thread. I don't know enough about 2BB to say for sure, but I suspect the perpendicular brushstroke could be useful for pulling pigment the way you want to in 2BB. For wet-blending, if you can start putting the next feather-layer down while the glaze is still wet you can get some really smooth transitions.

Hello Fellow Fans of Blue! I love Bones, because they're cheap enough for me to use to demonstrate some fun stuff. I know a lot of newer (than me) painters have lots of questions about color, light and paint mixing, etc, so I was hoping to put a bunch of that stuff here. My goal is to walk through a monochrome blue miniature, using a Kickstarter Mini, Kickstarter paint, and some simple/intermediate techniques while doing some "teaching" on color and light. Er, not ambitious at all! I get to practice while doing it, so we're all having fun! First, the players of our little game: For this tutorial I'll be using Sapphire Blue, Pure White (take my word for it, ignore the label) and Walnut Brown, and of course, 77063 Duke Gerard. Sapphire Blue is a nice bright (saturated) blue. It's a good standard blue as well. When you look at a color wheel, I tend to think of a cobalt or ultramarine blue as "blue" but sapphire is pretty good, and it's a kickstarter color and learn to paint kit color, so most of us have it. Next, what are their painting stats? How do they behave? What can we do to them? Here they are! Simply painted as a flat swatch of color on paper. The picture is a bit dark, sorry! I'm using walnut brown as my black- see how nice a dark it is! Now, for our volunteer Male Paladin I'm going to essentially be using 3 base shades: blue, blue with some white (1:3) and blue with some brown (4:1) Here they are on the palette: walnut, walnut/blue, and blue on top and white, white/blue on the bottom. Here's an example of the Sapphire blue with a wash in the first swatch. The second is by brown/blue mix with a wash, and the third white/blue with wash. Here's where we learn a bit about saturation. The first picture is bright. Nice pretty blue. Like an autumn sky. The second is dark, moody, stormy and intense. The third a bit lighter, fluffier and softer. Each of these shades reflects light to us differently. The more pure pigment in a color, the greater the intensity. The more we dull the color, either by adding it's complement if we're mixing pure pigments or by adding white or black, the more we alter it's ability to reflect it's color back to us. I think of this like hummingbird feathers. The hummingbird's got a specialized air bubble structural pattern in it's throat feathers that literally reflect a single wavelength of light. But- only at the right angle, which is why they often look dull or black unless you catch them just right. Paint obeys the same physics. The more stuff we put it in that can potentially reflect less light, the duller the color. A possible exception/complication is white, which is nice and reflective. White is great at drawing the eye on a miniature, and great for highlighting when you want bright highlights. More on this later. One fun thing you can see when painting is how translucency can affect the way color looks. See below: Hmmn. Those look similar, don't they? The top is a thin wash of sapphire blue. The left my white/blue mix (normal paint layer) and the right my sapphire blue with a white glaze. What I take from this is that you can paint however you want, using whatever technique you want, and get the results you want! There's not one right way to do it. So things like wet blending can mimic layering/glazing or washes! Remember with washes- here I'm painting on white paper, so the surface is very uniform and the wash smooth and flat. Your miniature may have many different surfaces, primers, curves, etc. When painting on the miniature, paint will obey the laws of gravity. It will pool in crevices and drip down surfaces if allowed. Also, washes are by nature translucent, so you'll need a smooth, well-prepared surface to get the maximum effect. Ok- let play with our miniature and actually paint! I've basecoated our Paladin using just our 3 colors. Again, Sapphire blue, Blue/White mix and brown/blue mix. I tried to think about where I wanted my most intense blues, where I wanted my lighter areas, and I decided ahead of time I was going to go for a darker look to the armor. This is a nice, messy, quick "speed-painted" basecoat. No fancy stuff. I thought I had trimmed his mold lines, but I missed a few. Oh well. He's an experiment, so I'll leave it! I did wash him with dish soap and water first. The cloak and hair I'm doing in sapphire, the skin and leather/pouches/etc in white/blue and the armor in blue/brown.

so this is a bit of a test piece to work with blending, I didn't have a lot of time as I needed it ready to go for game today as it's for one of my players so it's a bit on the rough side. http://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/8270842944/'> http://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/8269775469/'> http://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/8270842242/'> http://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/8269775979/'> http://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/8269774169/'>