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Studio Minidragon - High Quality Painted Miniatures

Start to Finish Guide: Painting a Custom Thug Battlemech

Let's get this thug painted!!!

In this article I go through the various steps I used to paint a customized Thug battlemech.

You can click on the small images to see a much larger and more detailed version to get a clear idea of the techniques and methods I've described.

In this first photo you can see my work area. I've got lots of light, my work surface is neat and organized, and everything I'll need is close by. having a clean work area really speeds up my painting and helps to maintain my sanity!!

Here we see the miniature before any paint has been applied. This particular figure was heavily converted from the factory model - conversions are a fun way to break up the monotony of similarly posed figures and can also create unique and characterful focal points in your armies.

Painting step one for this figure is a black undercoat (I use IWM Black). I know that I'm going to have some metal on this figure and that the overall feel will be dark and used - the black base will help to facilitate this.

Next is a heavy dry brush with a very dark gray. the mix was about 2 parts IWM White to 5 parts IWM Black. I covered the whole figure. When you drybrush it's important to get most of the paint off of your brush; with too much paint you'll cover the darker color in the recesses and ruin the effect.

Next comes another gray drybrush.  This time the mix is about 4 parts IWM White to 5 parts IWM Black.    The big areas of color you see on the cardboard mat in the pictures is from me getting excess paint off my brushes for drybrushing.  It’s very important that you not use a good brush for drybrushing!!  Few things can wreck a brush as quickly as using it to drybrush things!

 

Here is the result of yet another layer of drybrushing.  This time it’s slightly more than 1 part IWM White to 1 part IWM black.  At this point the detail is really starting to get well defined.

In this picture you can see that I’ve done another layer of drybrushing, this time though, instead of evenly drybrushing the whole mini I’ve concentrated on the upper surfaces.  At this point I’m really trying to define the highlights.  My mix is also substantially lighter, at this stage my paint mix was about 3 parts IWM White to 1/2 part IWM Black.  At this point I’ve spent about 30 minutes painting the miniature.

This photo might be a bit confusing, so I’ll explain…  In the last shot I’ve applied my last drybrush layer.  Here I’ve gone over the mini with a  very thin mix of medium gray (about 1 to 1 white/black).  Thin is the key word here...the goal is to smooth out the paint job and tie the drybrush layers together without completely covering them up.  I was careful to keep the paint out of any recesses...it’s important to keep the nice, dark panel lines.   Compare picture 7 and 8.  7 is very grainy looking...I like my mini’s to have a smoother look to them.  My work to this point has been to bring out detail, pick out the high points, and pre-shade the figure.

The difference between picture 8 and 9 is subtle.  Here I’ve added a tiny bit more white to my gray and done some additional highlighting.  I did this to build highlights in areas where the drybrushing didn’t reach or I just wasn’t happy with the existing highlight (in some cases because the thin coat of gray from Picture 8 wasn’t quite thin enough...I hate shooting myself in the foot like that!).

Now I’ve finished highlighting the gray and moved on to rust.  I used Partha Paints Oxide Orange to paint the weapon barrels, joints, claw, edges of the feet, and various splotches.

Oxide Orange is a perfect base color for rust, it’s a rich, almost brownish orange.  It’s okay to be sloppy at this stage...any mistakes can easily become patches of rust or streaks later on.

 

The next step was to drybrush the rust areas with a  metallic color.  I used Games Workshop Chainmail.  Be careful when drybrushing on the chainmail...it’s a bit harder to cover up metallic paints and without a bit of work, splotches of silver don’t look like chips!!  It’s important to note that a lot of the orange is still showing - this is a good thing!

This shot shows the rusty metal on the back side of the ‘mech. It’s important to be consistent in your painting on the entire figure...in this case, I tried to balance the amount of rust from front to back.  It might look odd if half the figure was significantly rustier than the other ha lf; though maybe you could say it was just laying in the mud for a while!

I’ve given the rusty parts a light black wash.  For washes I mix 1 part paint to 4 parts water AND one part Future Floor Wax  (the Future helps break surface tension...this allows the wash to stay in place instead of bleeding out of the recesses and leaving “rings”.   

At this point I also began painting the missile rack covers, I just painted a black line from one corner to its opposite and filled the lower half with black.  Next I painted the upper half white.  I finished by painting the white area with bright yellow

This photo shows some caution striping.  I tried to make these areas look worn and weathered.  I paint caution stripes in three steps:  1) Paint the whole “stripey” area white; 2) Paint white area bright yellow; C) Paint on the diagonal black lines. 

At this point I also used thinned black paint to add scratches, stains, and streaks…I just put them where I thought they might occur…you can get a good look at some streaks/scratches on the claw cover thing in the next picture.

Here is the beginning of a hand painted logo.  The logo will end up being a gem-like heart with a red border and the work “MUM” beneath it.  Those crazy pirates…you never know what they’ll slap up on their ‘mechs!

 I started by using black paint to draw the outline of the heart and the letters MOM (it started out as mom, I changed it to mum somewhere along the way…don’t ask why, because I don’t remember!).  The letters are painting intentionally thick,  the black is just the outline, it’ll get filled with white to really make the letters stand out.

This picture shows the letters and heart filled in with a very light gray paint (I used Partha Paints League White).

 It’s important to relax and take your time here, with practice you can fill things in very quickly and neatly.  I think it took me about 10 seconds to fill the heart and letters shown here.  Make sure you leave a thin black line around everything…this will help define the graphic

I missed photographing a step here…This picture shows the combination of two steps. The first step was to paint the white area of the heart with a deep red color.  I’ve used Partha Paints Robe Red (Robe Red is a fantastic, rich, dark red…I love it and use it frequently). Second I used a lighter, brighter red (Partha Paints Sword of Light Red) to fill a small part of the lower left bit of the heart…Why?  Well…..

Basically, a lens/gem/colored bead bounces light off it’s inner and outer surfaces. If you look at a gem you can see that it’s darkest at the top and gradually lightens toward the bottom.  There are also typically some very light spots… at the top where a lot of light that would otherwise enter the gem is reflected and near the bottom where light is exiting the gem.  With a real gem these light/dark spots and areas will change as the perspective changes…on a mini the reflection will obviously be static. 
Here you can see how I blended the lighter red into the darker red creating a smooth transition.  Blend is really a bad term here…I really just layer.  To get the blended effect I just painted on very thin coats of my lighter red on progressively smaller areas until I was happy with the effect. I also made the top right bit of the gem a little darker with some very thin black paint.
Next I painted very thin lines of Partha Paints Strana Mechty Red where the reflections might appear…along the bottom left edge/side of the heart and along the tips of the “humps”.

Here I very carefully added tiny white (IWM White)dots to the heart’s “humps” and a short thin white line at the bottom left edge.  These white bits really help to make the gem effect convincing. 

You might think that I used a very small brush for all this…that’s not really the case.  I used a number 0 (zero) brush for the whole thing (I only very rarely use anything smaller).  A half decent brush of this size should hold a good enough point to do very detailed work.  It’s good enough for me anyway…

Next I added a rim/background to the heart.  I just carefully painted it on with slightly thinned IWM White making sure I left a thin black edge to define the shape. It’s worth mentioning that I thin my paint less when I’m doing tiny details…with the paint too thin it’ll flow all over and make a mess; I add about half as much water to the paint as usual when doing the small stuff.

At this point MOM became MUM…it looks like the rim is the culprit, maybe I felt it was too close to the top of the o or painted over the o a little…no biggie…incorporating mistakes into the paint job can work out sometimes.

 

Here I've painted the white rim with Partha Paints Sword of Light Red.  That was it for the logo.  In all it took about 10 minutes for me to paint…so don’t feel like this sort of thing needs to take forever…
I painted a couple numbers on after the logo.  In this photo you can see that I started off by painting the numbers on with IWM Black (slightly thinned).  I kept the numbers thick because I was going to be painting white inside the black.

Here the numbers are nearly filled in.  Take your time, breathe, thin your paint a bit and it’ll be easy to leave a tiny black edge to outline the numbers.  I hand paint all my logos and numbers but there’s no reason you couldn’t use decals…(I don’t really like them though…I feel like I can usually do a better job by hand). 

Throughout painting this guy, I was steadily wrecking the gun barrels on his right arm…around this time I had to repair them.

In this photo I've painted a small, squatty keyhole shape on the top of the right foot.  This is the basis of  a skull.  I also gave the base a drybrush of a very dark IWM brown paint at this point (my bottle doesn’t have a label).
This picture shows the keyhole filled in with (old!) GW Elf Flesh.  Again, I left a thin black edge to define the shape.
This one shows the completed skull.  I carefully painted on the eye sockets and nasal cavity with thinned IWM Black.  I used IWM White to paint a strip across the bottom of the skull then divided the line into teeth with my thinned black paint.  Again, I did all this with a  #0 brush…smaller brushes might come in handy sometimes (I’m still trying to figure out when!) but I like my trusty #0!!

This photo shows the result of a heavy, sloppy “drybrush” of Partha Paints Wolf Brown.   

I didn’t bother to let the paint dry between the next few steps…it’s just the base and it’s supposed to be dirt, so I’m okay with some color variation - in fact, that’s what I want!!
The final painting photo shows the addition of another sloppy drybrush, this time with Partha Paints Galedon Tan.  When I say “sloppy drybrush” I mean that I’ve not bothered getting much of the paint off the brush…it’s just a quick dip in the paint, a single swipe across a paper towel (or my little mat), and then I’m applying paint to the mini.

Here I've applied some (cheap, generic) white glue to the base in selected spots (using that poor, abused brush from the very first photo!). 

After the glue was on I dipped the base of the mini into a big tub of green flock.  (**IMPORTANT  be sure the paint job is completely dry before you dunk it…unless you enjoy the FuzzyMech (tm) look…)

This photo shows how I apply “bushes”.  I use a shredded, colored, spongy material (from Woodland Scenics).  I have three colors: dark, medium, and light green.  I simply apply some more glue with my trusty glue brush and stick on bushes until I’m pleased with the result.
Finally, I apply a few more spots of glue and dunk the mini in my tub of Static Grass.  I normally do the static grass before the bushes….I don’t know what I was thinking…(not that it really matters - though, if you weren't careful with the glue, your bushes might end up all "hairy").

Voila!  The base is finished!  Well, not quite, in this shot I've painted the sides of the base with a medium IWM Brown (again, no label…sorry…).

And finally, here's the completed figure!

The last thing I'll say is that getting good pictures is pretty easy to do, even if you don't have the world's best camera. This photo (and all the others in this guide) was taken with an old Sony 1.3 megapixel camera. Mostly, getting good pictures comes down to lighting.