Basic Painting Questions

So there's been an eager new troll player that's just starting to paint, and he/she has been asking me questions through PMs on Dakka. I figure I might as well post up my answers here in case anyone is wondering about the same questions as well. Plus I think one of my answers will be pretty long...

Q: How do you do the skin on your trolls?
A: Here's an old post where I talk about painting the skin:
http://datrollcave.blogspot.com/2007/02/painting-maulerbegin.html

I've since sped up the process though to cut out the regal blue and electric blue steps. I now base with GW electric blue (also available as the same color in Vallejo) and mix in more and more space wolf grey as I highlight/blend up.

Usually around 3 steps for infantry, and probably about 6 steps for beasts. I'll then sometimes do a very very watery wash of electric blue again in the crevices only (i.e. use your fine detail brush and get a very watered down electric blue droplet).

Q: How do you do the leather?
A: This one is a little tougher to answer for me as I don't have a very standard process. I'll break it down into the various types of leather I've done:

Cowhide/White Leather: This was done on the impaler and you can read about it here.

Yellow/Brown Dirty Leather: Can also be found on the impaler post above.

Red/Brown Leather: This is (surprise) also on the impaler, but I use it on the Axer, and Grim Angus as well (Better pics of leather here). The painting process I used is found here.

Champions Leather Bits/Kilt: For these guys, I used a similar technique, but with more steps. I based in good ol' Scorched Brown (GW), lay down a layer of Bloodtracker Brown (P3), and then Highlight with Beast Hide (P3). Then I washed with brown ink and re-highlighted with beast hide. This was really fast and easy and for a unit of them, I didn't want to spend a ton of time on them.

For the unit leader's eye-patch I spent a little more time on it and highlighted with Bleached Bone (GW) also.

Q: What's your definition of a wash?
A: For me, a wash usually consists of a drop of paint on my brush and then dipping my brush in a clean cup of water (very rapidly). One dip for a dark wash (i.e. if I want some heavy shading in the crevices), two or three dips for a very watery wash. It's not a very scientific method, but it works for me. The first time doing this during a paint session, I'll usually test it on a piece of paper to make sure the consistency is right before applying it to the model.

Q: How do you mix paint and water without wasting a lot of paint? (you dont really know how much you need when you pour some out do you?)
A: I kind of don't have this problem due to the weird way I paint.

I don't really use a mixing pallette (tiles or those plastic paint trays). I've found that the paint dries quickly on those anyway and I actually end up wasting more paint than if I just do things my own way.

What way is that? Well I get some standard computer paper, and basically use that as my pallette. Le gasp! I know tons of people swear by tiles, or pallettes, but they just don't work for me. I've found that while using paper does make paint dry quickly, it's not much more quickly than if I were to use a painting pallette. This is mostly because I'm very very slow at painting, so regardless of what I use, my paints dry out by the time I go back to the pallette.

The other benefit of using computer paper (aside from being cheap, plentiful, and requiring no cleanup), is that as I do a lot of watery painting, I find that it has just the right absorbancy for my tastes. I don't want it to suck up too much water when I dab my brush on it to get rid of excess water. Brown paper, newspaper, paper towels, tissues, and the like all suck up too much water. Whereas tiles, palletes, and print magazines all wick away too little water if I have too much. Computer paper works great for this purpose.

So if my paint is always drying out on the paper pallette, how do I avoid wasting paint? Well, I basically only put as much paint as I need for one application at a time. So basically dip brush in paint, dip brush in water, wick away excess water on pallete (and check color at the same time) and then apply to model. Then I wash brush quickly, and repeat. For blending two colors, I add the first color to the paper, and immediately after, I dip the brush in the other color and add it to the paper. Then I use the brush to mix to my desired color, add some water if needed, and apply to model.

Keep in mind when I say I dip my brush in the paint, I'm talking about a drop of paint. Not a huge glob. So I end up using/wasting little paint. Just as a point, in painting all my trolls so far, I have yet to use up more than half of a GW pot of electric blue! While BrokenZealot kindly bequeathed to me his in case I ever run out (it's a discontinued color now) I've yet to pop it open except to move it to a new container.

Also, while this might seem slower, I've gotten quite fast at doing things like this, especially the skin. I can crank out a champion's skin now in about 15-20 min (that's fast for me ok! :P)

For non-watery coats, or non-blended painting (i.e. basecoats), I just paint directly from the paint pot, onto the model.

Whew that was a long and complicated answer! I'm not sure it will be helpful to anyone, as it's a pretty weird way of doing things, but it works for me, so I'm not about to change heh.

If anyone has any other questions about how I do things, feel free to drop a comment and I'll try to answer best I can.