Bones: The First Coat is the Difference

[Last Knight]

Gorram this thread, I keep getting Cat Stevens/Sheryl Crow stuck in my head every time I see it.

[Dibbler]

I have stripped a bones model (Sir Garric of Scale), by leaving him in green soap. Will whatever makes bones pre-primed have been stripped off as well? Should I prime him?

[Joe Wells]

Bones aren't "pre-primed" as such. It's just that the material they're made of doesn't need to be primed.

 

So no, just wash and paint.

[Maledrakh]

Army painter colour spray primer worked fine on the bones gargoyle i tried it on. Quite a thick coat as well.

the bones had been washed, scolded in hot water and repositioned.

[JeffStray]

...scolded in hot water...

I really, really, really enjoy imagining this.

 

Did you flare the wings out? That's what I want to do with mine, but haven't messed with it yet. If so, is it holding well?

[Steg]

Does this apply to reaper wash?

 

I understand I should not take paint from the bottle, mix water into it, then apply it to Bones. I should put paint from the bottle onto the figure directly (for the first coat).

 

In my paint set from the Bones kickstarter, there were two bottles of wash. "Flesh Wash" and "Black Wash". I assume these are paints with water already mixed in, should they not be used directly on the Bones until after a coat of normal paint? Or will they work because they are from Reaper?

 

[Wren]

Wow, I can't believe I overlooked testing the Reaper washes on the Bones! I will try to do some tests tonight and report back how it works. Thanks for pointing out my oversight!

[Harrek]

Has anyone tried priming with the Citadel primers? I've have those and use them on the metal minis and have never had a problem. Just wondered if they work well on Bones minis or if I should buy something else. I normally prime metal white unless it's a mini that needs to be "dark".

[CylustheVirus]

 

Bottom line, if I wanted to just "dirty up" some undead skeletons, would I need to base coat with pure Reaper paint (white or bone white?) and then do the dillute wash type thing to bring out some details? Or do you recommend that dillute with Reaper sealer + 1 drop of water thing you post for your own skeletons?

 

As a total painting newb (I did try to "spruce up" my War of the Rings game, to poor effect) I'm looking to figure out what sort of minimal effort I can put into painting to get maximal effect.... for monsters and such I'm hoping for that 20% effort to get 80% of the effect... once I'm practiced and maybe have a main character I want to paint I could go into more details....

 

I've painted up a batch of the skellies already, and tried a few things on them

 

Painting them with a white basecoat, doing a strong walnut brown wash over them and then lightly drybrushing them with linen white over the top gives a very 'aged bone' look. Sort of brown and grungy, like they've just dug themselves out of the grave.

 

Lining them with blue liner, painting white over the top and then doing a blue wash / white highlight gives a much cleaner looking skelly. Here's a shot to show you what I mean:

 

 

 

 

Hello there! I'd really like to see the skeletons you've posted, but I can't see the pictures for some reason. Are the links dead? In any case, my Vampire Kickstarter order just came in and I've never painted a mini before in my life, so any pictures of people's results would be very much appreciated.

[Laoke]

Hello there! I'd really like to see the skeletons you've posted, but I can't see the pictures for some reason. Are the links dead? In any case, my Vampire Kickstarter order just came in and I've never painted a mini before in my life, so any pictures of people's results would be very much appreciated.

 

 

Possibly - I've had some issues with pictures 'falling off' the site. Lemme see if I can find them in my content...

 

 

 

Hopefully these ones will survive!

[Wren]

Does this apply to reaper wash?

 

 

My apologies that this took a little longer than I had said. I tested the brown and black Reaper washes on the fronts of some of the original test skeletons. (So these are straight from the blister Bones.) The brown worked pretty well, though not quite as well as the best of the other products tested. The black didn't do quite as well, it failed to completely fill all the rib depressions. Now it's entirely possible that one of my wash mixes was older than the other, and I've found that some straight from the blister Bones are more hydrophobic than others. My guess is that if you washed the Bones with soap and water the Reaper washes would work pretty well. If you wanted to make them fainter in colour, I would use Reaper Master Series Sealer or one of the other clear products recommended in the original article. Next time I drag out all my photo stuff I'll try to take a picture to add to the article.

[OneBoot]

I tried undiluted Reaper's Flesh Wash on the bottom of a KS Bones rat base just to see what it would do (the mini had been washed with dishsoap and rinsed well prior to painting). The wash took quite nicely, and gave a nice even coat. However, bear in mind that this was a flat surface, so YMMV.

 

Huzzah!

--OneBoot :D

Edited July 4, 2013 by OneBoot

[Steg]

I tested the brown and black Reaper washes on the fronts of some of the original test skeletons. (So these are straight from the blister Bones.) The brown worked pretty well, though not quite as well as the best of the other products tested. The black didn't do quite as well, it failed to completely fill all the rib depressions.

First, thank you very much for testing this out. I would have tried it, but I don't really have any idea of what I'm doing. To that end, a flurry of questions: What am I supposed to do with the reaper washes? Are they already mixed, and I just use them like paint, or am I supposed to mix them with water? If they still need water, what's the difference between black wash mixed with water and black paint mixed with water? And then there's a bottle labeled "black ink" is that just a color name, or is it actually ink? Can that be used like paint, or is it pretty much only for washes? (And washes with ink are darker or more even than washes with paint, because liquid itself is colored, rather than suspended bits of color, right?)

 

I tried putting the black wash directly on the painted mini, but it seemed really thick, maybe not as thick as paint, but it didn't do the running-into-cracks thing very much, at least, not as much as when I mix a couple drops of paint and a couple drops of water.

 

Thanks for the info and responses, you posters are invaluable for new folks trying to figure out what to do with these mysterious alchemical bottles and tiny people.

[Wren]

I hardly ever use pre-made washes and inks, so hopefully some people who do will chime in.

 

The Reaper washes are pre-mixed to be wash consistency. They are paint mixed with water, they're just a shortcut to doing it yourself. They might also have a little more flow improver in them than the a straight paint, but all Reaper paints have a small amount of flow improver in them. Flow improver helps the paint flow more easily off of your brush, and helps a wash settle into the depressions better.

 

Note that water does evaporate, albeit slowly, from closed plastic bottles, so if you've had a bottle sitting around a while (or that sat around a while wherever you purchased it), it will be thicker than one freshly mixed. it's a good idea to check your paints once a year or so and add a bit of water as necessary. Thicker ones will benefit from being stirred rather than just shaken. (You can pop off those dropper tips, though it does get a little messy.) Reaper paints are hand mixed at their facility, so there can also be a slight variance from one batch to another.

 

For non-Bones use, I'd say if you find the pre-mixed wash too thick (or too dark) for your purposes, add some water. Adding water will work poorly if your plan is to use the wash directly on the Bones material. In that case, I'd recommend adding Reaper's brush-on sealer, or Folk Art's Glass and Tile Medium, which is an inexpensive product you should be able to find at a craft store like Joann's or Michael's. If you can't find that one, look for Delta Ceramcoat All-Purpose Sealer. Those are all transparent products that will make the wash less dark. Note that they're also thicker than water, so it might not seem like your wash is flowing all over like if you added water, but you'll be able to push it into the depressions if you need to.

 

Alternatively, give your Bones a basecoat in any colour paint of your choosing. Once the paint is dry, apply the thinned wash and it should work just fine.

 

People often use inks to make washes. You will probably need to thin down an ink to use it as a wash, as inks tend to be very intense in colour. For that reason, people will also sometimes use inks to intensify other colours. So if you painted a redhead and it wasn't red enough, you could thin down orange or red ink and paint it over the hair to make it a more vivid red. Inks use different pigments and different formulations than paints. They tend to dry slightly shiny (which you can sometimes use to effect). They can also sometimes 'reactivate' and run or seep a little if you paint other paint over them. I haven't experimented with the Reaper inks much, they might not suffer from this property. (People also use inks from the art store and such as well as those designed for miniatures.)

 

Whether you make an ink from paint or ink, or use a pre-made wash, it can help to use gravity to your advantage. So sometimes it helps to hold one side up to help the wash run into the depressions, let it dry a bit and then paint the other side of the figure in a similar way. Also you do sometimes have to move the wash around with your brush to get it to sit in the depressions. So if you find the wash isn't settling into the depressions of an area, try running your brush over it again. You also want to make sure you have a lot of wash on your brush. Then you can just run it over the surface of the figure and the texture will pull the wash off your brush. (Whereas with regular painting, you want to NOT have a big clump of paint on your brush!)

[OneBoot]

Thanks for the post, Wren, that was extremely helpful!! :)

@Steg - My own experience with the two premade Reaper washes I got with my Starter Kit (Flesh Wash and Black Wash) was very similar to yours (a bit thicker than I thought they should be, not quite flowing into crevices, etc.), and I had the exact same questions! A very helpful, more experienced member posted the following on my WIP where I was trying to figure these washes out:

As for washes, go get a palette with wells. You can get them cheap at Walmart. Put a drop of wash in a well. Use your brush to drag it up the side. If it runs almost immediately down, leaving only the barest hint of color it is right. If it clings to the side add water. You are looking for something akin to skim milk or just slightly runnier. You can add just a hint of dish soap to decrease surface tension. This will let the wash run into the crevices easier. The best way to make sure not to over do is get a bottle of water, put in one drop of soap, and label it "wash water" or something similar. Use this whenever you need to thin a wash.

Another way to get washes into the crevices is to coat the mini with a gloss varnish and allow it to dry prior to washing. There will be less "tooth" to grab the wash.

Huzzah!

--OneBoot :D