Miniature Painting Techniques—Glossary

[TaleSpinner]

When I first started teaching classes at ReaperCon, I developed a class called Miniature Painting Techniques during which I demonstrated several techniques to my class.  I also had a Glossary handout I gave out to the class.  As ReaperCon grew and changed the cost and structure of classes, I stopped teaching that class (about 4 years ago) because I felt I need to provide less of a demo class and more hands-on learning.  After much discussion in the ReaperCon forum and since I do not intend to teach it again, I decided to share my glossary with you so we all can more easily refer to and start developing a better understanding of these terms.  I should note, that these are not official term, as there really are none, but a description of how I understand and apply them.

 

I'm hoping that other instructors ( @Wren, @Kuro Cleanbrush, @Corporea, et.al.) will add their variances to what I am publishing here.

 

I also ask that we keep this thread free of chatter not related to the material so that it remains easy to find the information that is added here.

 

Miniature Painting Techniques—Glossary

By Andrew Pieper

 

Base Coat/Base-coating

The base coat is the first coat of paint you place on a miniature, not including the primer.  Typically, it will take two to three applications to ensure that your base coat is opaque.  The colors you choose for your base coat will depend on how you intend to paint your shadows and highlights, as follows:

• Dry-brushing/washing: Base-coat in a shade somewhere between the shadow wash and the highlight.
• Layering: This really depends on how you want to paint and how you view the miniature.  I originally always highlighted up, so my base coat was almost always my shadow color.  But now, I base-coat with the mid-tone and then use a series of glazes to apply the shadows and then layer in the highlights (this technique seems to give me a better contrast.
• Blending: Most wet blenders I have seen start with a base coat midway between their shadow and highlight.

 

Blending

Blending is the smooth transition from one shade or color area into another. There are several common techniques for achieving a smooth blend, including (but not limited to) wet-blending, layering, feathering, glazing, or a combonation of these.

 

Brush Control

Brush control refers to the skill with which a painter wields the paint brush and controls the way she lays paint onto the miniature. A master painter knows through experience exactly how much paint is needed in the brush, how to touch the mini, what stroke to use, and how much pressure is needed to obtain the exact placement of paint.  Learning to control the placement of your paint, especially when thinned, is perhaps the most important step in becoming a great painter.  Unfortunately, it is also a skill that is nearly impossible to teach and comes to each of us through practice and time spent painting.

 

Your ability to control the paint with your brush will be affected by many things, including the quality and type of brush, size of brush, consistency of your paint, the brand of paint, the surface you are painting, and more.  The many variables are the reason you need to develop brush control through practice and work.  Only by trying many different things and working with the mediums to find what works for you will you learn good brush control.

 

Color Theory

Color theory is essentially the science of color, how we perceive color, and how colors interact to produce effects and emotions in the viewer.  I won’t go into color theory here as that is a whole class or three on its own. Just know that it is something you will need to study to some degree if you want to get the most out of this hobby and attain a high standard in your minis.

 

 Dark-lining

Dark-lining refers to the practice of placing a very thin line of dark color (usually brown, blue or grey that is nearly black) along the border of two different areas on a mini.  This sets the areas apart as distinct and makes them “pop” bringing life to the mini.

 

Dark-lining is typically achieved in one of two ways.  First, many people prime the entire mini in a dark color.  Then, when base-coating, they leave a thin line of dark color showing at the margins of the various parts.  The other method is to paint the entire mini and, as a nearly last step, paint the dark-line wherever it is needed. This later method gives you more control over where the dark line goes and how it looks, but it also requires a high degree of brush control. A big advantage to the later method it that it also allows you to cover small flaws, cleaning up the miniature as you dark-line.

 

Dry-brushing

Dry-brushing is a method of adding highlights to a mini by applying thick paint to an old brush (i.e., brush you don’t care about), wiping most of it off and then lightly rubbing the brush over the high points of the miniature.  It is considered a beginning and/or speed technique as it is very easy to do and quickly lays down highlights.  The problem with dry brushing is that you typically do not have any fine control over the highlight placement and the finished highlights tend to look dry and “scratchy”.  That said, this method is excellent to create highlights quickly as is used a lot for speed painting.  It also makes really good looking sand, dirt, rocks, and lichens on rocks.

 

Feathering

Feathering is a method of smoothing the transitions between one highlight layer and the next when using the layering technique to lay highlights. Essentially, instead of laying down each layer with a smooth boundary, you feather the edges of the layer boundary so that light feathers of the new layer extend into the previous one.  This causes the boundary between the two to blur a bit, giving a smoother transition.  It also works really well with glazing to produce super smooth transitions.

 

Freehand

Freehand refers to any design painted on a miniature that does not follow a structure that is sculpted into the miniature.  This includes painted designs on fabrics, scales that aren’t part of the mini, the crest on a smooth shield, eyes, etc…  Most freehand requires fairly thin paint and good brush control.  One tip for getting the most out of your freehand is to lay down the basic shape of the design you want to paint in Creamy Ivory.  White toned paints have large pigment flakes so they cover better than other paint.  They also provide a nice canvas which will make most freehand art pop.

 

Glaze/Glazing

A glaze is a thin layer of transparent paint deliberately applied to an area of a model. Glazing is similar in nature to a wash, but the paint is applied in a controlled manner and is not allowed to pool on the miniature.  Glazes are useful for changing the color of an already painted area of a mini.  It can also be used to even out the tones between two highlight layers by glazing in an intermediate tone; this is especially true when using the feathering technique while layering.  Skin tone glazes are also often used over tattoo designs or other skin marks, giving them a more realistic look. Another use for a glaze is in applying the shadows to metallic paints when painting with the TMM style. Finally, glazing itself can be used to create very smooth shadows and highlights though the patient application of many thin glaze layers.

 

To apply a glaze, first start with paint thinned to the consistency of milk.  Wet your brush with the glaze paint, and then gently wick out most of the paint on your towel.  The bristles should just be damp.  Paint the surface to be glazed just so that it gets wet, but so that no paint pools anywhere. If you do it right, you will likely have to put down several glaze coats to get the effect you want.

 

Basic Glaze Recipe:

Number of Drops	Material
2	Master Series Paint
2 to 3	Flow Improver
4 to 6	Water

 

 

Highlights/Highlighting

Highlighting is the process of painting the effects that light would have on your mini if it were full sized.  The way light looks when striking a full sized human and a mini are different naturally.  You would normally think that being 3D objects, you should be able to just paint a mini in a single color and allow the natural light to do its thing, but it doesn’t work that way.  Minis painted without highlights and shadows look flat and unrealistic due to their small size.  To compensate, we paint the highlights onto the minis.  Highlights are usually applied in one of three ways: dry-brushing, layering, or wet-blending (each of which is described in its own entry in this document).

 

Layering

Layering is the application of shadows and highlights in a series of thin paint layers, each layer being allowed to dry before applying the next. Each layer is a different shade than the last, building a smooth gradient of color progression from dark shadow to bright highlight.  Some people start by base-coating the miniature in the darkest shade colors and then layer their progression steadily laying down ever lighter layers toward the light points on the mini.  Others start with the mid-tone as a base-coat, and then layer down to the shadows and then back up to the highlights.  You will have to determine which way works best for you.

 

The more shades you have in your layering progression, the smoother the progression will be.  As a general rule, you will need more shades in a large open area such as a cloak or shield and few in a small area such as a small bottle.  For most surfaces, I use five to nine shades, depending on what I am trying to achieve with the mini.  When speed painting for my armies, I only use three shades, but this tends to look more like cell-shading and doesn’t look as nice.

 

 

Done well, especially when done in conjunction with feathering and glazing, Layering will give you very smooth transitions and a high quality miniature.  Many of the best miniature painters rely on layering for all of their highlights.  The main downside of layering is speed.  It takes a very long time to mix all the shades you need and to apply them all, especially when painting something large like a dragon.

 

Basic Layering Consistency Recipe:

Number of Drops	Material
4	Master Series Paint
1 to 3	Water

 

 

Lighting, OSL (Other-Source or Object-Source Lighting)

OSL refers to lighting you paint onto a mini that is coming from a source other than overhead.  This may be from a flaming sword, candle, torch, lava, or any other source of light in the miniature.  You typically paint the OSL after painting the miniature with standard overhead lighting.  Apply the OSL as a series of glazes to the areas of the mini that would be touched by the other light source.  The color will usually be a muted shade of the light source itself.

 

 

 

Lighting, Zenithal

Zenithal lighting is the standard lighting you highlight most every miniature in.  It refers to the light coming from the zenith or top of the mini, in other words light coming from overhead.  To get the best look, imagine the light shining onto the mini from directly above and slightly in front of it. As you turn the mini, leave the light in the same position so that no matter which angle you view the mini from it looks like the light is shining down on it.

To help you learn where to place highlights, take pictures of your minis after they are primed with only one light in the zenith position.  Take these pictures and convert them to grayscale.  This will give you a really good reference of where you need bright spots and deep shadows.

  

 

NMM (Non-Metal Metallics)

As its name suggests, NMM is a method of painting metals without using metallic paint. This method uses standard paint, adding the lighting on the metallic areas through careful placement of light and dark paint. This is the same method employed by canvas painters for metals.  This technique typically takes a lot of study and practice to pull it off well.  One problem with using this technique is that on real metals, the light reflections shift as one views it from different angles; however, with NMM you paint the reflections to look right from a few specific angles.  This makes them look off when viewed from an angle that was not intended by the artist.  That said, regular metals do not photograph well, so this technique allows an artist to have complete control over the light on the metals from a prime viewing and photographing angle.

 

Paint Consistency/Thinning

One of the most important things to learn is to properly thin your paints and to know what consistency is necessary for each technique and circumstance.  Most beginning painters do not thin their paints enough. This leads to rough looking surfaces and a “gloppy” appearance.  Typically, especially on Reaper Bones, one uses slightly thicker paint on base coats, and then uses much thinner coats for applying layers. Other techniques use different viscosities, such as thick paint for dry-brushing and very thin paint for glazes and washes.

 

Often painters use additives when thinning paint.  Flow improver is especially important to keep the paint from separating as it dries.  If using Reaper Master Series paints, this usually isn’t an issue as flow improver is already in the paint, but a little should still be used in very thin applications.

 

For an excellent article on thinning paint, refer to “Let it Flow” in the Craft Section on the main Reaper website.

 

Primer/Priming

Primer is special paint designed to both etch and stick to metal surfaces and also provide a surface that other paint sticks to as well.  Without primer, paint will not stick to a metal surface for long.

 

The Bones material, however, does not need priming when painted with most hobby acrylic paints; in fact, some primers make paint stick worse to Bones.  That said, the special liner paints in the MSP line stick very tightly to the Bones material and make an excellent primer and dark shadow layer when applied straight from the bottle without thinning.

 

Shadows/Shading

The inverse of highlights, shadows are the places on the mini that would be in shadow when light strikes the upper surfaces.  Shadows are usually applied in one of the following ways: washing, base-coating, layering, glazing, or wet-blending (each of which is described in its own entry in this document).

 

TMM (True Metal Metallics)/Shaded Metallics)

TMM is a method of painting metals where you use reflective metallic paint as the base-coat.  Unlike NMM, this allows the light sheen to change as you view it from different angles.  However, if you were to use the metallic paint alone, you would have no control over the lighting at all and the miniature would not photograph well or look as well highlighted as the rest of the mini.  To solve this problem, painters using the TMM technique apply several glaze layers to the metal paint to simulate shadows and other effects like rust, followed by picking out the highlights using brighter metallic paint like Polished Silver or New Gold.

 

Transparency

Transparency is a property of paint referring to how opaque or transparent a paint is.  Paints with large pigment particles (white) tend to be more opaque and cover other paints better than those with very small particles (red and blue). Some techniques such as layering and glazing, require that the paint be somewhat transparent to obtain the best results.  Also, the more you thin a paint, the further apart the pigment particles will be and thus the more transparent it will be. Reaper Master Series paints are formulated to be somewhat more transparent that other paints, allowing for easier use in layering.  The HD line is formulated to be more opaque and tends to cover in fewer coats.

 

Varnish

If you intend to touch your minis after painting them, it is important to seal your paint with a varnish.  This is especially true if you are painting a metal miniature.  Also, some varnishes such as Testors Dulcoate, dull down the shine that some paints have, giving your mini a more realistic look.

 

Wash/Washing

Washing is a method of applying paint into all of the crevices of a mini.  It is typically the method used to place shadows onto a base-coat when using dry-brushing for highlights in speed-painting.  Washing is very similar to glazing, just less controlled.  You use very thin paint, the consistency of skim milk.  You must treat this paint with a flow improver or as the paint dries it will leave “bath-tub” rings on your mini.  Liberally apply the paint to the area to be washed, allowing it to pool in the crevasses.  Allow the mini to dry and the paint will be deposited into the deep places of the mini.

 

Typically, washing is not used with the layering or wet-blending techniques as it lacks the control necessary for those techniques to look good.

 

Basic Wash Recipe:

Number of Drops	Material
1	Master Series Paint
2 to 3	Flow Improver
4 to 6	Water

 

 

Wet-blending

Wet-blending, is a process of applying shadows and highlights to a miniature by mixing wet paint on the miniature to achieve a smooth shade transition from shadow to highlight.  This technique produces nearly flawless transitions and is used by many of the best painters in the world.  However, it is difficult to keep acrylic paint wet at a proper consistency long enough to blend the shades together.  To solve these issues, painters have developed several special techniques for wet-blending such as the two-brush and one brush techniques.

 

Wet-blending is typically considered an intermediate to advanced technique as it requires a high degree of brush control to achieve good results.

[Glitterwolf]

Thanks for this!

[Guindyloo]

Thanks for all the info!

I find it interesting that you're listing the term Blending to be interchangeable with Wet Blending. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I've only heard people refer to blending as the transition of one colour to another and then Wet Blending, Layering, Feathering, Glazing, 2 Brush Blending, etc. are different methods/techniques by which to achieve those blends. Interested to see if I'm the only one operating by that definition.

[TaleSpinner]

3 minutes ago, Guindyloo said:

Thanks for all the info!

I find it interesting that you're listing the term Blending to be interchangeable with Wet Blending. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I've only heard people refer to blending as the transition of one colour to another and then Wet Blending, Layering, Feathering, Glazing, 2 Brush Blending, etc. are different methods/techniques by which to achieve those blends. Interested to see if I'm the only one operating by that definition.

 

I’m pretty sure that Rhonda uses your definition.

 

I learned it as two or more paints actually blending together.  I’m old though, so...

[buglips*the*goblin]

This is why standardization is hard. 

[Cyradis]

20 minutes ago, Guindyloo said:

Thanks for all the info!

I find it interesting that you're listing the term Blending to be interchangeable with Wet Blending. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I've only heard people refer to blending as the transition of one colour to another and then Wet Blending, Layering, Feathering, Glazing, 2 Brush Blending, etc. are different methods/techniques by which to achieve those blends. Interested to see if I'm the only one operating by that definition.

 

This was my understanding too. However, wet blending might be the most literal interpretation: it is the only one in which the paints are mixed on the surface (to my knowledge). The others do things to a single paint on the surface. "Blended" might be a better term for what we are thinking of, and achievable in different methods. The "blend" part of it would refer to the effect, instead of the method in that case. Arguably, glazing is a type of layering, and feathering is a way of smoothing layers. Standardization is hard, but I still think it may be worth instructors time to work together on picking some community terminology for classes. 

 

Thank you for the guide @TaleSpinner; having a term compendium is very handy, and is a useful guide for checking skills off a list of things to learn. 

[Al Capwn]

29 minutes ago, Guindyloo said:

I find it interesting that you're listing the term Blending to be interchangeable with Wet Blending. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I've only heard people refer to blending as the transition of one colour to another and then Wet Blending, Layering, Feathering, Glazing, 2 Brush Blending, etc. are different methods/techniques by which to achieve those blends. Interested to see if I'm the only one operating by that definition.

 

You aren't the only one. I view Blending as "establishing a gradient" regardless of technique employed. I consider Layering/Feather/Glazing as all blending techniques;, but I consider them "dry" techniques compared to "wet" blending. I.e. it requires the previous layers to be dry during application of the next, whereas all forms of wet-blending methods (to my knowledge) operate with wet paint interacting with each other.

[TaleSpinner]

There, I edited the glossary to separate and define Blending from wet-blending. Check it out. 

[hungerfan]

So if I don't have flow improver do I just use more water to make the glaze?

[TaleSpinner]

1 hour ago, hungerfan said:

So if I don't have flow improver do I just use more water to make the glaze?

 

If using MSPs, yes, they have enough in them to make them behave without the flow improver.  I have also read that some people like sealer in place of the flow improver.

[Clearman]

11 hours ago, TaleSpinner said:

 

If using MSPs, yes, they have enough in them to make them behave without the flow improver.  I have also read that some people like sealer in place of the flow improver.

 

I would ask the same question regarding using MSP Wash Medium.  If I put a drop of flow improver, sealer, and wash medium side by side, the wash medium looks like a mix of flow improver and sealer.

[Cyradis]

Perhaps this thread should be pinned? 

[Zink]

Echoing what Cyradis said. Nothing useful to add from my POV but loving the information you all are giving.

[Corporea]

That's awesome, Andy!

One thing for everyone to remember when thinning paint is that even in one line of paint (say RMS, vallejo, golden, craft paint, etc) each individual color will behave differently.  They all have different base pigments, opacifiers, varying consistency, etc.  This makes the "use x amount of x" frustrating to painters, because they may see differing results.  I remember getting so excited when Anne put out umber brown, since it's my favorite goto in acrylic for certain effects and color schemes.  But, the RMS version is highly transparent, making it less suitable for basecoating, and more for glazing.  Likewise, the clear colors from Reaper are very transparent, making them fantastic for glazing and finishing touches, but if you try to use them for coverage, you'll be disappointed. They also for the same reason, do not require as much thinning as other paints in the line to achieve a good glaze.

 

What I am getting at is the need to experiment when using new colors. Play with them on paper. See how they thin, see how far they extend in a wash on something like watercolor paper.  This will teach you a lot about the paint itself and you'll start to get a feel for how much water to use.  I live in a humid area, so I tend not to thin my paints as much. sometimes I thin them on the mini itself because it takes awhile for them to dry.  Certain ways we paint evolve from out environment and comfort level.  There isn't one right way to blend or paint, and you'll learn more from experimentation then you might expect!

 

Be aware some terms in mini painting differ in the "art world" and especially if you follow the Historical miniatures side of things, fine art world, or the Europeans, they may use terms completely differently.

 

For example:

in watercolor, a wash means just putting down paint for the most part, as water color relies on transparency.

filter from the historical side of things means applying a glaze.

tint in acrylic means adding white, but in watercolor means adding water (since the paper is usually white...)

And color theory varies a whole lot depending on who you talk to.  We use a completely different system than printmakers/computer graphic design folks and than lighting/electricians as well! 

shade can mean "a certain hue (meaning the color we see like ultramarine blue)" or adding black to change the value, or creating a gradient from light to dark... confusing, eh?

 

English is a tough language to start with, never mind blending fields together!

 

[TaleSpinner]

2 hours ago, Cyradis said:

Perhaps this thread should be pinned? 

We don’t pin anymore here as too many things were pinned.  Instea$ we add them to the first post of references that is pinned. I have added this to that list.