I am at the point now where I need to start adding figures and details to parts of my layout. Painting these has always been time consuming and a pain.
Typically I have applied one color at a time to several figures at a time, then done a little weathering to them to finish them off. Is there an easier way?
So as the title says, I am looking for your tips and procedures on how to paint and finish these items simply, easily, and fast.
Well, just to start the thread off, my answer is…no.
What you described is what I do, but don’t take my word - you can check out the youtube videos for guys doing wargamming (who churn out figures by the dozens) , and that’s what they do (they vary the techniques with washes, underpainting, shading, etc).
Basically - clean, including removing flash and mold lines, prime (nice neutral base coat) - body skin details (face & hand & legs etc), then attempt to paint out in layers (say shirt, then jacket or pants then shoes, what seems most logical) - then washes to bring out the details - dullcoat. There are some variations and simplifications, but mostly like that.
Only things I can add - I do several figures at a time (my limit is 1 dozen) so I can reuse the same colors on different figures (save time in having to mix the same paint over and over again), figures that I know are background (or inside vehicles or buildings or otherwise rather hidden) get simplier paint jobs - maybe no jewerly, no beards, etc. And don’t be afraid use use Sharpies (if only they made real fine tip Silver and Gold - other brands of art markers often just don’t cut it).
I believe that at even at the current state of technology, most companies use hand painting in a fashion similar to above (which as the How It’s Made for resin figures showed).
ETA: Perhaps one thing - there was an article long ago in MR, maybe late 1970s (I didn’t get the anniversy DVD, and looks like I never wiil) - he primed a lot of small details (like the cast items old craftsman kits use to come with) first, painted the item t
There is no easy way to paint a lot of figures. Its time consuming and thats why we doit. There’s a commercial model railroad in southern BC that has some 20,000 figures all painted by the wife of the proprietor. Wonderful work. I’d suggest you take up watching football or baseball while you paint figures.
Sounds like you already have a handle on paint selection etc. so just stay with it do a dozen figures at a sitting and soon you’ll have a population to be proud of. BILL
The hired help (I mean unpaid slave) uses a glue gun to stick a whole row of them to a stick (note the gluegun) and proceeds with multiple colours. When taking the people off the stick, if you choose you can run a blade between the glue and the stick and that leaves a little platform with which to keep the little folk in a vertical position, or just pop them off and use another method where the glue otherwise would be an eyesore.
Before all this starts, a good wash using a strainer dipped in soapy water in the sink makes the paint adhere all that much better.
I agree, the process of painting figures and small details in quantity, is labor intensive. However, I like this type of work. I paint one color on many figures at a time, let that color dry and then paint a different color, so on and so forth. All I can say is try to enjoy yourself while you do it. You cartainly can speed things up by using the process BATMAN uses. These things really are pretty tiny in HO, so some flesh color on the hands and face and different colored hair is about all I do to the face as details such as the eyes seems to make them look bug eyed, so I leave this flesh colored.
Brent,
LOL, I wasn’t going to reply to this thread…My very thought about it was to say, hire Batman’s Daughter. Now I come back and read the new replie’s…Low and behold…there She is. I wish my slaves were into that many moon’s ago. [Y]
Take Care! She’s a keeper.
Frank
Btw: Chutton War gaming figures, You not only have to paint them…You have to build them first. Torso’s, head, arms, hands all in different positions, depending on what they are doing and what weapons they are using or holding, which must also be painted. One of my Son’s who is fourty, goe’s to wargaming and I do the figures and vehicles, Made By Warhammer in the UK.
Thanks for the replies. I was hoping for a secret easy way someone discovered, but I guess that isn’t going to happen.
Thanks to everyone who replied.
SECRET EASY WAY of LION
Pick up your cat
cuddle your cat
put bandaid on scratches
find a single cat hair that she left behind on your shirt.
glue the cat hair to a stick. This is your paint brush for painting lips, eyes and buttons.
ROAR
Gandydancer,
Consider the “Brifayle” technique. It’s simple and it works. Take a look at the website. The main tutorial is in O-scale, but can be easily applied to HO as well:
Antonio, thanks for that. I will give it a try sometime.
Nobody has mentioned this yet? Get a magnifying lamp or an Optivisor. The hardest thing about painting small details is that you can’t see them, unless, of course, you have a young pair of eyes to do the job.
I typically paint the flesh tones first. These don’t have to be neat. Actually, I intentionally paint “outside the lines” a bit, because they will be covered later. Shoes are the same way if the figure is wearing long pants. I do my figures with craft paints, so I use a piece of scrap cardboard as a palatte and I might have a few colors open at once. I usually only do a half-dozen figures at a time, though, because that’s the number that fits most scenes for me.
I get the impression from his beginning OP (and I sort of hinted at in my initial response), Elmer already seems know a lot about painting figures (including using fine brushes, using magnification, washes, etc), he just wanted a simplier and/or faster method. The question is there really one, beyond the ‘paint in layers’ that I and Mr Beasley mentioned (skin first, then inner details which can be covered (overlapped really) by outer details)? Perhaps not with today’s technology, or Presier would already be doing it (computer guided 3-D pad-printing)
BTW, the **‘**Brifayle’ method mentioned above I thought was also called “underpainting”, but it’s apparently not. It (seems to me) to be a way to emphesize fine detail, creases, folds etc from the opposite direction that we normally do - have a darker “highlighting” undercoat and brush the paint over that, vs. painting the figure and adding dark washes to settle in and emphesis the detail.