I received my little miniatures for Dungeons & Dragons and my painting supplies. Now I will need to paint them, somehow. They're really itty-bitty!
Does anyone have miniatures painting advice?
With Commodore having taken a, uh, vacation, I can offer some advice though my experience is more with pewter models.
The single most important thing is to get a plastic-safe spray primer. Spray primers go on thinner than brushed primer so more detail in the model is retained. Other useful tips:
-Acrylic paints are your friend. They can be thinned down nicely and tend to dry as matte, as opposed to gloss.
-Make sure your paints dry matte, not gloss. You may think you want gloss for highlights or to give it a fantastical edge; you don't. It will just make the mini look toy-like.
-For the first coat (hopefully the primer, but otherwise the base coat) make it the same 'tone' as your finished mini. If the finished mini is a dude in heavy armor, you want a black base coat. If it is a light tone, go for a lighter base/primer.
-Drybrushing is your friend, especially for doing armor. Put some paint on your brush, wipe it on a paper towel until most of the paint is gone, and then drag the 'dry' brush along the edges/ridges you want to highlight.
-Using a tiny brush, mixing some white into your paint and drawing a line along the edges of cloaks/clothing can add a lot of dynamism to the model.
-Don't try and paint facial features. Unless the D&D models got a whole lot bigger than I remember, any attempt to paint facial features will look anywhere from clownish to a Picasso come to life. (An ear there, a nose here, eyes sliding down into the cheek, etc.)
Realized that since Model United Nations has gone virtual this year and I don't need to buy plane tickets, I have some extra cash so I dropped it on some train models:
First is a model of an EMD NW2 switcher locomotive in the Great Northern 'Empire Builder' paint scheme. This locomotive comes equipped with a 'decoder' which is a tiny computer mounted in the locomotive so it can be controlled by a computer. This permits multiple locomotives to be run and different speeds and directions on the same electrical circuit on the track. This one also comes equipped with a speaker and sound decoder so it will make diesel noises and change in pitch/tone as the engine is put under greater load.
The second is an EMD SD9 road engine, built to do all sorts of work, from switching to hauling trains over mountains. This one is in Great Northern's "Big Sky Blue" scheme which was started in the late 1960s, and that paint scheme is one of the reasons I 'model'* Great Northern in the late 60s/early 70s. This one does not come equpped with a decoder, so I'll have to get around to installing one myself, though thankfully this is a later model, so it is decoder-ready, shouldn't have any need to solder wires or -god forbid- mill the frame.
*At this stage merely collecting stuff and having more ideas than sense rolling around my head!
You can see some of my other models sitting on storage tracks in the background. (Great Northern S-2 Northern-type steam locomotive, a Great Northern GE U25 Road Engine, also in Big Sky Blue, and some heavyweight passenger cars in the background (circa 1925, for use with the S-2.)
