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In a post Bones IV world there are lot more translucent miniatures in circulation. You may have had the same reaction I had, where I thought they were neat, but had no idea what to do with these things. Well, today was the day I decided I was going to try a few different experiments with painting these things to see what would happen. I did try an experiment once before with some purple translucent modes from bones 3, where I put a black wash over them. I was not happy with those results. They turned out looking opaque black with purple highlights from a distance, and translucent against a light or if you looked real close. Not a strong enough effect for table play. So this time, I did a bunch of research (mostly on this forum) and was told about using a clear coat and ink to add definition and maintain translucency. Looked good in the pictures, so I thought I would try some variations on that. First thing I wanted to experiment with was testing something I read here that said something to the effect of "the clear coat actually makes them more translucent, because it changes how they reflect light" so I thought I would try a matte clear coat and a gloss clear coat and see how they compared. The following are a very light black ink wash (from the Reaper Ink triad) and then Tamiya X-22 gloss clear (on the left) and Tamiya XF86 gloss matte (on the right). These models were not very translucent to begin with, but both coats did really make them appear more clear. The gloss was very shiny, had a distinctive wet look, and makes the model look like a clear piece of hard candy. The matte coated model appears to let about the same amount of light through, but is less reflective than it was before I coated with anything. With less reflection the model looks a little less ethereal, but also less like a plastic toy. I decided that I didn't want wet looking spirits, so I decided to go with a black ink wash and the matte coat. Here are those results: Much better than my last attempt, which were only transparent when held against a light. They are still reflective, but less than out of the box. I also tried a red ink instead and it had a very striking effect of red against the blue (the colors didn't blend at all like I thought they would) but it wasn't what I was looking for, so I washed it off. Here is a comparison of a painted and unpainted model: So really, I would say not painting them at all is totally viable. I like having the details show, but if they are ghosts, maybe it is okay that it is hard to see without taking a very close look. I also did a matte coat on some crystals (no ink) and it improved the translucency greatly, though it is hard to capture in a photograph. I learned I prefer that matte coat to clear, (but both are cool). Inks work well, where standard acrylics did not last time. Clear coats do make them more clear. and they transparent models look ghostly and cool already, so painting them isn't giving you that much really, if they are only intended for table play. maybe this information will be useful to someone. I wish I could have found it all in one place when I was puzzling over what to do and what to purchase.

Looking for some advice on using inks in painting. So I've seen people using inks and spouting praise about their uses with mini painting. Especially for glazing purposes. I got a set of cheaper inks last christmas, but they really didn't play nice. They were constantly rehydrating. Even with a protective layer of spray varnish. As soon as I painted over top of it, the color would bleed back up. Anyone know what I was doing wrong? Or if I was using a kind of ink that wasn't compatible? I bought a set of 10 colors from amazon - ZZKOKO caligraphy pen ink. I got an airbrush recently and have heard that white ink results in smoother zenithal than traditional white paint. Any words of warning?

Hi all, It has been a while since the last post, but here is a quick, step-by-step painting guide to the Silver Death Fish for DeepWars. This model is suspiciously similar to an ancient Xiphactinus fish, but has slightly different fins, with a few finlets near the tail like a tuna. This model was primed in white and painted using the techniques very similar to the Dire Fish-Lizard from the AMG painting guide, Painting Scaly Beasts. The key was to use washes and glazes to give it the basic colors, then lighten sections with thinned white paint and make edges pop with pure white. The majority of the colors were Liquitex Professional Acrylic Ink, while paint was Golden Fluid Acrylics and Americana white and black. All ink was mixed with Liquitex Matte Medium and water to give it more body to flow into the cracks. Otherwise it tended to stain the scales instead of flow into them. So the first step was to paint the upper sides, back with very thin washes, almost glazes, of Deep Turquoise ink and medium. The mixture was around 20% ink, 40% medium and 40% water. These are not exact numbers, but the mixture was light enough to apply color and flow into scales but left a lot of lightness. A key here was to set the model upside down while it dried so the color did not flow down the entire body. When it was dry, the next color applied was Quinacriadone Magenta ink, painted in a very light glaze around the middle of the body and onto parts of the head and the fins. The mixture was more about the same density as before but less was held on the brush so it did not run everywhere. The model was held upside normally while applying this glaze also. Next, The head, belly and lower body was painted with a glaze of the original turquoise mixture. Finally, a wash of Pthalho Blue ink (same medium and water percentage as before) was applied on the top of the back. The model was inverted and light brush strokes were used to push the glaze further down the back and blend it with the Turquoise scales. The next step was basic shading, done with more glazes or Pthalho Blue ink on the back and Turquoise ink on the sides, going over the Magenta scales. This glaze was very thin, closer to 10% ink, 40% medium and 50% water, with the here to tie all of the colors together with blue. Also applied were glazes of black paint mixed with Pthalho blue ink onto the top of the back and in the mouth. It looks pretty messy now, but you can make out the basic idea of the light and shadow. When all of the color had dried, the next stage was adding basic highlights. This was done with slightly thinned white paint, maybe 60/40 paint and water, applied lightly onto areas that would reflect light. This mixture was used with very careful drybrushing in multiple layers on the scales to build up edge highlights. It is important to brush perpendicular to the scales and not scrub in all directions here as otherwise the scales just get a coating of white. The goal is to just do the edges of the scales lightly and build up layers. Also, a glaze of white was applied along the upper third of the body to increase lightness there, allowing it to flow into the cracks and all. This glaze is just paint and water and was "scrubbed" around a bit with the brush to blend it. This technique is also called "feathering" but is basically just quick brush strokes to reduce the sharp edge of the glaze. The final stage was done with edge highlights of more white paint, mixed with less water, around 80% paint, 20% water. This mixture was used for some edge drybrushing on the scales, and on the fins and teeth, with some additional black paint glazed in the mouth and around the base of the teeth. This mixture was uses with a fine brush to pick out scales using the tip of the brush to add highlights where the drybrush missed. Some pure white paint was used on scales that were lightened in the previous step. On the fins, the edges were highlighted with 80/20 white, but some fine line details were added with 50/50 white using a fine-tipped brush. To finish off the glazes, a light mixture of Raw Sienna ink and Primary Yellow paint (10% color, 40% medium, 50% water) was applied along the middle of the body, above the magenta section, and on the head and around the eye. The eye was painted with a mixture of yellow and white paint, with a black pupil and a tiny dot of pure white for a hotspot reflection. The base was done in steps similar to the body, with a wash of Burnt Sienna paint, medium and water (20/40/40), then when dry, two washes of Pthalho Blue ink (20/40/40) to build up color. The base had some small cracks in it that were filled with extra Matte Medium and allowed to dry, then painting over them. Sections of sponges were painted with Pure Burnt Sienna ink and the starfish was done with Dioxazene Purple ink + white paint. Some Sap Green ink was applied as a glaze to add more color to the rock.

I present Unit R.Snog, a quick ink-job over lunch break. He is somewhat unique in that he told me his name before I'd painted his head or face. "Snog" means "kissing" in British and "grass snake" in Danish, so one can only guess at his mission and operational parameters.

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.

With tax returns coming soon, I'm looking to invest in some more tools to facilitate cranking out better minis! I'll first lay out what I have so far, followed by what I'm looking to get, and I'd like tips on those things and any I may have missed. For those that would like to participate, please share your opinions based on your own experience and please be specific with brands/models and your experience! "I have a Donegan OptiVisor 3.5x at 4" and it helps me see finer detail on 25mm heroic minis" is loads more helpful than "You should get a magnification source". I've come to greatly trust and value the opinions of the fine folks of this board and would love advice based on your experience! I understand much of this can be found by digging through the forums, so I understand those who don't wish to participate, but believe that besides myself, others could benefit from a consolidated thread for upgrades, especially with tax return season upon us! Current supplies: A handful of vallejo paints, matt medium, matt and gloss varnish Daler Rowney FW Inks in Black and Yellow Ocher Citadel Layer, Base and Large Drybrush brushes Princeton Select Round Blender 6 W&N Series 7 size 2 and 00 Sta-Wet Wet Palette Master Brush Cleaner and Restorer Hobby Knife Desired supplies: Ottlites (probably 2) Magnification of some sort. Either a visor or the ottlite with magnifier. A large container of Liquitex Matte Medium for mixing homemade washes More inks! Flow improver (primarily for washes, but also to further experiment with wet blending) A pin vise Basing materials (have bases, need terrain stuff!) Green stuff (and liquid GS) Lots of Reaper paints! Interference paint I'm willing to allocate a fairly sizable portion of my return to the hobby, but inexpensive options are obviously desired as it will allow me to get moar stuff! Thanks in advance for any help! edit: struck through acquired materials

So here's my latest completed mini. Other than the base coating, which I did last week in Reaper pure black and Vallejo Game Model Color German cammo black brown, I knocked him out in about 3 hours this evening. I still have a small amount of touch-up work to do (at least a second coat on the base) but he is essentially done. I tried a few new things with this guy, and I am very happy with how he turned out. First, I tried painting blue gemstones on the hilt of the sword, which I think came out pretty good for my first attempt at doing them. I also made use of my Army Painter inks, using blue tone on the sword blade and blue and purple tone on the shield. I really like how that turned out. I'll do have full WIP write-up on him later (I took a ton of pictures while I was painting him with my camera and new SD card, and now I can't access them because my SD card reader stopped working. Have to buy a new one this weekend.) Anyway, I hope you guys like him. Comments and suggestions are very welcome!

Edited now that I'm back home... I started this mini on Friday, and tried to do a centre-out light-to-dark translucent paint job. The Badger Freak Flex tints just beaded up in an initial coat - even when adding medium it didn't help. I had nothing to get the centre yellow without going opaque which I didn't want to do at this point. I then took my Napthol Crimson (Red) Liquitex ink and added a drop to some medium and that went on fine. I forgot that Burnt Umber is very orange, and if I'd done that first I could have tried to do something interesting with the shadows in red. Oops! Attempts to highlight with that didn't do much at all. I decided to do a few quick washes with a mix of DIoxazine Purple and Prussian Blue, and got some nice shadows from that. I also daubed the eyes with a bit of Blue Flame from the KS2 paints. The next morning I took an update photo and noticed the great directional light from the window (inspiration pics below). After that I scrapped what I was doing and decided to try and paint the highlights that I saw in the photo. I used FIreball Orange HD (29806) and Gilded Yellow HD (29845) up to Gilded Yellow /True White (1:1). I'm especially happy with how the back turned out - I think that's partly because the blue/purple shadows really pushed the contrast more. I also didn't want to do half the face in bright yellow... so I didn't. This mini photographs MUCH better than it looks in hand. If you can open 2 windows to compare side-by-side, it's recommended. Linked for nudity. Front http://tinypic.com/r/rj4279/8 Back http://tinypic.com/r/2ljpces/8 Inspiration photos Front http://tinypic.com/r/i71t79/8 Back http://tinypic.com/r/vo8im1/8

Here is Enigma Miniatures Lox Jarg, Wings of Dishonor (ENM3041). His skin and feathers were all done in Ghoul Skin, washed in black, and highlighted with white. Then I applied varying amounts of blue and yellow ink. I'm pretty happy with the way it came out. As always, C & C welcome!

I was just wondering if alcohol inks were safe to use with minis painting. I've found a way to get some extremely cheaply, but I wasn't sure if it would work well for miniature painting. Basically, it's ink suspended in 70% isopropyl alcohol. Would that strip any of the paint off? Is sealing the paint job with testor's dullcote first necessary? Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Probably the answer is obvious but I don't know. Just scored a bunch of P3 paint for a buck fiffy a pottle (cus hey, a painter without paint is like a duck with no feathers). The guy at the store said "I'm sorry, I don't know. I've never painted a miniature in my life. I play boardgames." He was nice though. So what do you do with ink? Because they also had Vallejo ink AND wash, so I guess they aren't the same thing. Those weren't marked down but I was happy to see something other than GW paint for a change. Thanks to ye, O learned oracles of the Reaper boards, for speaking wisdom to this lowly mendicant who is too lazy to find answers to his questions on his own.

I've found a method of producing extremely cheap, but effective inks for washing your miniatures! It involves stuff you can find for very cheap at your local dollar store, so here's hoping this helps some people. WARNING: Please, only use this stuff if your miniature is properly layered with paint. Do not use this if you paint in thick layers as the alcohol will strip a few layers of paint before it drys completely. If layered properly, the paint job will not be affected noticeably. Make sure before using this stuff your paint is 100% cured. When in doubt, wait a day. Step 1. Go to your local dollar store. You have a small shopping list of stuff to get. a) A bottle of isopropyl alcohol. Usually it is 50% here. Do not get stronger than this! b) Empty pour/spray bottle packages from the beauty supplies area of the dollar store. The ones I bought came in a 4 pack, 3 spout bottles and 1 spray bottle. c) A few (3-4) packages of color markers. These have basically everyone color you would use to ink a miniature. d) You're done! Return to the battle station to begin prep! Step 2. Now take each bottle and fill it ~50% full with the isopropyl alcohol You can add more, just make sure you have enough pens on hand to use with it (you'll find out soon). Make sure to dilute the alcohol a bit to ensure it doesn't strip any paint, but enough to suspend the ink properly. Step 3. Divide up all of the colors and group the same colors together across all sets. you should have at least 2-3 of each color if you bought enough markers. Two of every marker is the minimum here. Step 4. Now, crack open each marker and extract the ink-filled cotton inside. It should be inside of a small plastic tube. Remove the cotton carefully (try not to get ink everywhere, but it happens. My colorful hands can attest) Step 5. Pre-label each bottle for what color you want to be in it. Many of the dark colors, if properly dense in pigment, are going to look blackish and would require testing to see what color it is. Just use a sharp and a piece of masking tape to label what color each bottle is so you know at a glance. Step 6. Put two ink swabs of the desired color into a half-filled bottle of alcohol. I've found that about 2 in half a bottle makes for a fairly dense ink without it being overpowering. You can add more alcohol to dilute it more to your liking. These numbers are based off of 3 ounce bottles while using thin markers. If using fat markers (~15mm thick) try using 1 swab first. If it isn't dark/bold enough, add another. Step 6(a). If you want to create some variable colors, feel free to mix ink colors. Want a blue-green? Throw 1 to 1.5 of each into the bottle! It's quite easy to make a few odd, but useful, shades if you care to. Step 7. Let the ink swab soak in the alcohol overnight and the following day, it should be safe to remove the swab (if you want. It's not necessary) The final result: Each bottle will have great ink for washing over your miniatures. In total, I now have about 12 useful colors of ink and it cost me less than $10! Hope someone finds this useful. Thanks for reading EDIT: I went ahead and did a bit more testing and it seems to strip the paint off of other things quite easily (the miniatures I've tested are unharmed). I used it on some painted stone and painted clay. Both of them lost paint in places. Only use this on a miniature! Avoid use with other sculpt crafts!