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On 12/6/2018 at 7:59 PM, BertD said:

Okok, thank you. I probably won't have Reaper'S bone line after I paint my last one, I ordered the Learn to paint Kit , to test if I would like that or not ! 
Games like BGCC and okko Chronicles , Monumental , ReichBuster .. etc.. react well to Primer normally , its all plastic minis anyway right? 

 

It always starts small, "just a couple of these, and maybe one of those..."  Next thing you know, the wife is pulling them out of the stock pot and looking at you like there's NOT supposed to be a dragon (or Batmobile) in there.  :jester:

 

Unfortunately, not all plastics are created equal.  Even Reaper's Bones formula has changed since it was first started.  I think that mix is a PVC formula, as are our soon to be coming Batman minis.  So it's definitely better to test things first.  

 

I haven't worked with ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) before--except to play with LEGO bricks, that is.  This is the other material the Batman minis will be made from.  So have no idea what spray primers might do with it.

 

If we were working with HIPS (high impact polystyrene) I wouldn't worry.  That's what GW uses for their plastics.

 

Which brings me to another point: be aware of your local weather conditions when using sprays.  The humidity can make a huge difference in the quality of the priming, as can the distance between spray can and miniature.  I've been using brush on primer (well, the Reaper liners) for some time now, so I'll defer to others' experience regarding the best times to spray and the proper distance.

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55 minutes ago, strawhat said:

 

Which brings me to another point: be aware of your local weather conditions when using sprays.  The humidity can make a huge difference in the quality of the priming, as can the distance between spray can and miniature.  I've been using brush on primer (well, the Reaper liners) for some time now, so I'll defer to others' experience regarding the best times to spray and the proper distance.


I imagine Brush primer is not as fast as Aerosol Primer , but work better? At least we don't care about the humidity with brush primer?... its Winter here at least -20 everyday  ! 

Can't wait for April ... do you think we will get a delay in the shipping 😛

I expect May or even june ! 
don't know about Monolith but every Kickstarter campaign I back for now are 1 or 2 months late! ^^

 

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14 hours ago, BertD said:

I imagine Brush primer is not as fast as Aerosol Primer , but work better? At least we don't care about the humidity with brush primer?... its Winter here at least -20 everyday  ! 

 

It's not as fast, no.  But the advantage of being able to work year-round here (the Great Plains) makes up for it.  Additionally, you can often thin it a bit to help make sure you don't lose any detail.  I had a couple bad experiences with spray primer: once I was too close and sprayed too heavily, and the other was humidity related.  Once bitten, twice shy.

 

The liners have an additional benefit, as well.  With the color selection available (blue, grey, brown, red, green, and sepia), you can do another bit of ground work to help your base coat or work with colors that typically don't cover as well.  Reds and yellows are often tricky and require multiple base coats to get decent coverage.  By using a brown or red primer layer, you can help provide a "friendly" base to help out with those shades.

 

Heh.  As much as I'm looking forward to April, I'm not really looking that far ahead.  I have Reaper's Bones IV Kickstarter coming in February(ish), many leftovers from Reaper's Bones III, and a serious backlog of Imperial Assault miniatures, so I've got plenty to do in the meanwhile.  That being said, I'd worry more about the miniature production than some of the other components.  So while I think April is good, I wouldn't be shocked by May or June.

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8 hours ago, strawhat said:

 

 

The liners have an additional benefit, as well.  With the color selection available (blue, grey, brown, red, green, and sepia), you can do another bit of ground work to help your base coat or work with colors that typically don't cover as well.  Reds and yellows are often tricky and require multiple base coats to get decent coverage.  By using a brown or red primer layer, you can help provide a "friendly" base to help out with those shades.

  

Just for Exemple : imagine that i Use Green Primer ... do I Prime the entire of the minis in green? just like I'll do with grey or black Aerosol Primer ? .. or do I need to Prime for exemple  , The face With Grey primer and the Weapon with a Black Primer etc...   or that just doesnt make a diffrence and the "color primer" just helps the paint like red and yellow to stick better ? 

EDIT : I Know that I need to do my testing by myself. but your advice are greatly appreciate guys 😄
thanks a lot 

Edited by BertD
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Yellow is a difficult color. It takes a lot of pigment and our eyes pick up any variation in brush stroke or thickness so easily. I saw a presentation on just how difficult yellow was at a medical imaging conference. I don't remember the details, but it focused on the wavelength and energy spectrum properties. It's difficult in a lot of other contexts as well. I find it usually takes several carefully placed brushed coats of yellow to get it look okay.

 

Pure white and pure black are almost non-existent in the real world. You're better using those to tint and shade other colors or really thin white for highlight. For something you think is flat black, tint it a tiny bit with another color it can stay really dark just not pure black. That was the advice from an oil-painting class years ago anyway.

 

One of the more difficult things to do as well, that really stands out on a miniature is eyes. There's a chunk of our brain devoted to facial recognition and it will pick up details on the eyes over everything else. A little off in any way and it pops out. I don't quite know how some of the professionals do it. I generally use a black ink or shade in the eye sockets to darken them. When that's dry I use a 10/0 brush to put a small horizontal oval using an ivory or bone white. Pure white stands out too much; look at peoples eyes in real life and what color do you see? Then using black (yeah I said don't above but it's soooo tiny), try to make a triangle pointing down starting from the middle top of the white oval. I do this by putting my 10/0 brush onto the center of the top of the white oval and then stroking down a tad. If the stroke goes over below, it's not too hard to come back with flesh color and correct it from the bottom of the eye using horizontal strokes.

 

All this said, I mess up eyes about a quarter of the time, paint over it and try again the next day. Doing it immediately is too frustrating, and I usually don't wait for it to dry and it just becomes a bigger mess. Sometimes I just give up and figure it'll just always have that goofy expression and I'm moving on because it's just not going to happen. Aka, don't sweat it too much.

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23 hours ago, BertD said:

Just for Exemple : imagine that i Use Green Primer ... do I Prime the entire of the minis in green? just like I'll do with grey or black Aerosol Primer ? .. or do I need to Prime for exemple  , The face With Grey primer and the Weapon with a Black Primer etc...   or that just doesnt make a diffrence and the "color primer" just helps the paint like red and yellow to stick better ? 

Yes, if you're going to use a shaded primer you would just hit the model with it like normal--so it will really only be useful if you have a figure where the bulk of that figure will be in a shade like red or yellow.  The shaded primer just cuts down the number of coats you need to apply to get proper coverage.  So, it might not be worth it on Red Hood or Robin, but if Atrocitus  or The Flash were to make an appearance...

 

I've only gone to the different colors of primer/liner on a couple models, most of the time I just get into the groove and everything gets the same color base coat.

 

Eyes stink.  Big time.  But I will second everything that @garbetsp said about them.  A good off-white for the sclera (I use Reaper's Linen White) is a must.  One tip I've read about is to have the figure looking to the left or right instead of dead-on, so you only have two parts to paint instead of three.

Edited by strawhat
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Just my 2 cents with something that I think I have not read it here yet. The following advertisements are not about painting itself, but very related (it's the step before and the step after painting):

1) Be careful with humidity (and also to heavy changes of temperature). That screws everything when it comes to priming. Avoid priming on wet days (if you do it outside).

2) Shake the primer can (if you prime with a spray, that is quicker but more expensive than priming with a brush) like there's no tomorrow. Seriously, shake it for 1 or 2 minutes vigorously. And if you prime several miniatures in a row, shake the can again every 5 or 10 miniatures.

3) If you varnish your miniatures to protect them, see points (1) and (2) above, because they also apply if you use a vanish in spray (which is way quicker although more expensive).

4) There are several types of varnish: brilliant, matt, or satin. Brilliant is... very shiny, but I think it's more resistant. Matt it's more realistic and avoids any shine. Satin I think it's somewhere in between. I tend to varnish mate for everything except for shiny pieces (metal armour, gems) that I apply some brilliant varnish.

 

And don't forget the following: enjoy!!

Edited by Carquinyoli
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I needed to prime this weekend and live in an old drafty house and it was around 20 degrees outside. I wanted to warm up the can, so I put it under my shirt to use body heat. I was jumping about making yipping noises when my wife said, "Why don't you just use the heating pad?". DOH! 🤣

 

So I did, and primed in the basement. The heating pad made it really easy to have the primer at a reasonable temp coming out of the can in the winter.

 

Also, multiple short passes with primer are better than one thick pass. Got to come at all the angles quickly. It reduces risk of gooping.

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Are you referring to the big pot of quickshade where you dip your model, or the dropper bottle washes? I use the latter all the time, spread with a brush; the former tends to leave a too glossy and patchy result for my tastes. It's a nice, natural brown that can be used to quickly shade (ooh!) many colours, and if you're going for a quick and easy "one shade for them all" method, Strong Tone is among the best options there is. I painted my entire Conan King Pledge very quickly using AP's Strong Tone wash as a cheat for shading. For a more "artistic" result I tend to mix purples and dark turquoises into my shadows, but that's for painting contest stuff rather than board game pieces.

 

And although I'm a bit late to the topic, I very much prefer Vallejo Model Air acrylic-polyurethane primers. You can actually use a regular paintbrush to brush them on your models (so you won't need an airbrush), and it's very fast because the primer is very thin compared to regular paints. I find it almost as fast to brush on the primer than to use a spray can - and if priming only one or two models at a time, brush-on primer is actually faster because then I don't need to set up my spraying box on the balcony and spend minutes dancing with the spray can shaking it. The acrylic-polyurethane has worked very well for both Conan and Mythic Battles: Pantheon miniatures. I usually prefer black primer, but you can use grey or even white for a brighter, more vibrant end result.

 

I mix and match Citadel, Vallejo, Army Painter, Formula P3, Coat d'Arms and Reaper while painting - most paint brands have good stuff, and it mostly comes up to a matter of personal taste which brand works best for which task.

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@BertD: The Army Painter Strong Tone is a fine shader, and will work nicely. I used it on most of my Conan minis. However, it is very brown. That seemed to work for rough and dirty low-fantasy warriors and monsters just fine, but I don’t know if it will fit into the colorful world of Batman quite the the same. The AP Dark Tone has a much more neutral ‘black’ effect. It is very dark though, so it will definitely darken your overall painting job. Ultimately I’m not sure that there is one shader that will work for everything you paint. For example, I recently painted the Viral Outbreak mini set for Pandemic, and I learned some hard lessons about shading modern-era colorful minis. There are colorful characters with yellow hazmat suits, and scientists with white lab coats. The Strong and the Dark shades made them look ‘dirty’. Fine for an orc, or Barbarian, but just not right for a mini that should look ‘clean’. I wound up using the AP Soft Tone for the faces and hands, and then either using a watered down Dark Tone for the clothing and doing a LOT of drybrushing to return clothing to a bright clean look. In the case of white lab coats, I didn’t shade them at all. It’s nice to have many options of shader. I don’t have experience with other brands, but the shader set sold by Army Painter that has several tones and colors has given me a lot of options. With the Conan minis, I found that painting armor with gold paint and then following up with a red shader would give me a very nice copper effect. Or painting chainmail or platemail with silver and then following up with blue shader made for a cool looking effect. Options are key with shading, I could possibly see wanting a blue shader for a blue rendition of Batman’s cape, as an example. I’m painting the Gates for Cthulhu Wars now, and the colored shaders are working great. Another example; I got a nice ‘Ice’ effect on the gates by applying blue shader directly to the white primer and then using a sponge with white paint over that. The red shader is working well over red paint on the Black Goat’s Gates. So, again, options are nice...

 

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Thank you , My Captain! 😂

I was talking about the big pot , but My intention was not to dip the model in it , more like applying the shade with my brush 

but if I want to apply the AP' Quickshade strong tone with my brush is better to buy the dropper bottle washes instead.  am I correct? 

I don't have an airbrush (not planing on buying one) so I like the fact that I can use  Vallejo Model Air acrylic-polyurethane primers with my brush 

2 hours ago, The Captain said:

you're going for a quick and easy "one shade for them all" method, Strong Tone is among the best options there is

my question about that is... If I paint a Light color Like Yellow or something in fire (orange-red-yellow-White) I'm wondering if the Quickshade is too "dark" to be apply
and I'm better if I use for exemple a Citadel Light Shade or something like that ! 
 

after many tutorial videos I think ill try them first since its cold here (-34) this morning .... Feelsbadman 😆

how much time does it take to dry compare to a Aerosol Primer? 10 minutes?  30minutes? 

 

Thanks guys! 

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@Epaka My Man! 😄

 

I definitely want my Batman minis to have bright color for some like Yellow or The blue cape etc..

I'll still probably use AP strong tone for some of the minis but...

it will be better to have a Yellow Shader or a red one  if I want brighter color,correct? 

what brand to you use for that? 

Army Painter's Quickshade kit or Citadel shade kit , is their more out there?? 

 

https://www.amazon.ca/Nontoxic-Miniature-Washes-Dropper-Bottles/dp/B0714QL55V/ref=sr_1_cc_2?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1544715583&sr=1-2-catcorr&keywords=army+painter+shade

 

https://www.amazon.ca/Citadel-Paint-Shade-Set/dp/B00KOD3FM8/ref=sr_1_1?s=toys&ie=UTF8&qid=1544716392&sr=1-1&keywords=citadel+shade

 

 

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I usually let the brush-on primer dry for an hour or so before painting on it, but you can probably start sooner if you need to. Me, I prefer not to rush. It's not uncommon for me to apply a quick primer on a model in the morning before leaving for work so I can start painting right away when I get back home.

 

I think Strong tone is still best for shading yellow/orange, but you can dilute it with water for a softer tone if you feel it gets too dark as it is. You could also use any paint you like and dilute it into a wash consistency so you're not limited to just the shades you find ready in a pot. I use whichever plastic lids or disposable plastic spoons I have handy (or baking paper) as disposable palettes when mixing paints/washes.

 

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11 hours ago, The Captain said:

I usually let the brush-on primer dry for an hour or so before painting on it, but you can probably start sooner if you need to. Me, I prefer not to rush. It's not uncommon for me to apply a quick primer on a model in the morning before leaving for work so I can start painting right away when I get back home.

 

I think Strong tone is still best for shading yellow/orange, but you can dilute it with water for a softer tone if you feel it gets too dark as it is. You could also use any paint you like and dilute it into a wash consistency so you're not limited to just the shades you find ready in a pot. I use whichever plastic lids or disposable plastic spoons I have handy (or baking paper) as disposable palettes when mixing paints/washes.

 

Thanks, I think I will go with Citadel's paint for now and Try it, they have Shade paint , I think it will be more easy for me to use those shade paint than creating my own and applying washes 

 

 

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