Frank Branham: Craft 103 - Descent Beastman Basic Painting Tutorial

This all started because Alan Moon has an impressive Descent setup: Two tackle boxes filled with a Hirst Arts 3D Descent tileset, all of the bits, and D&D Miniatures figures to replace most of the Descent figures.

As I had the Hirst Arts dungeon all done and painted—more on that in a later installment—I was really interested in getting the painted minis to go with it.

Until I looked at the price on some of the older rares that you kind of have to pick up. I can paint figures in batches averaging about 30 minutes per figure. They won't be competition, but they'll match the game perfectly, and the paint jobs will be better than the D&D minis. And when I think about it, the techniques I'm using aren't really that hard to do as long as you can color in between the lines. (And I could actually never do that as a kid.)

So I thought I'd share and take photos as I prep, paint, and generally muck with my set of Beastmen.

Tools:

• Brushes—I'm using three paint brushes: a small #01 and #0 basic brush that came out of a cheap $1.50 bag of brushes, and a tiny, tiny #00 that I use for the details.
  
  
• Hobby knife
  
  
• Paint—I am currently using a Games Workshop basic paint set. Minis paints are nice because they tend to run thinner than craft or artist's paints and flow over the surface you are painting without thinning. I do have some artist's paints in tubes. You can actually get by with red, blue, yellow, white, black, brown, and flesh colors. Flesh is a tricky thing to mix and you use a lot of it, so you really want a basic flesh tone paint. I also use basic craft paints for metallic colors. Silver, gold and copper cover just about everything you will ever need.
  
  The artist's paints are quite thick, so require thinning with water and...
  
  
• Slo-Dry—I'm using a Liquitex product from a craft store that slows the drying of paint. Acrylics dry very quickly, and the Games Workshop line doubly so. When I need to mix a small batch of paints for assembly line painting, I add a few drops of this so that it won't dry by the time I've finished the first color. (GW paints seem to dry on a palette in about a minute.)
  
  
• Liquitex Gray Gesso—This is my primer of choice. You can buy this at a craft store.
  
  
• Minwax Polyshades Tudor Stain—Outer clear coating. Use the darkest color of this you can find. The Tudor is almost black, but is a bit hard to locate.
  
  
• Testor's Dullcoat—Outer outer clear coating.
  
  
• Talus—Railroad hobby shops have a selection of rock debris. I ended up with some finely crushed rocks (medium grade) in both light gray and iron oxide.
  
  
• Miscellany—Paper towels, tiny plastic water bowls, a magazine, a TV tray, an old toothbrush, and something flat and plastic to use as a palette for mixing.

This ends up being about $70 if you start from scratch. Fully half of that is the GW paint set, so you might consider a cheaper set of artist's paint or even the craft paint.



Prepping: (45 minutes)
The first thing you need to do is wash the figures. Plop them in a small bowl with a bit of lukewarm water and some dishwashing detergent, scrub them thoroughly with a toothbrush, then rinse them in the sink.

Make sure that the water is not too warm. Descent plastic softens a lot in warm water, then fixes into a new position as it cools. You can easily fix warped figures by running hot water over them, then holding them in position while running a stream of cold water over them.

After allowing them to dry (briefly), coat the figures in Gesso. I painted only the figure part, ignoring the base (as I have other plans for the base). Gesso is interesting stuff—a mixture of acrylic paint and chalk that shrinks a lot as it dries. It does a nice job of maintaining the detail of a figure. The downside is that there are sometimes gaps as Gesso shrinks.

The technique I use here is to occasionally lightly dip my brush in water, then in the thick, goopy Gesso. You really need to thin the Gesso at least a bit. If you are mixing a small batch of thinned Gesso, you'll need to thin it with 15%-25% water in a small Dixie cup.

I've used Gesso only a couple of times. With practice, this step will get faster. I really like the results, however. It sticks remarkably well to the plastic. I also prefer a gray Gesso, although you can buy Gesso in several colors. Black is hard to paint over and may require a few coats of lighter colors. White is easy to paint over, but any spots you miss while painting show up readily. I've also heard reports that the white tends to shrink less as it dries.

Gesso does take awhile to dry, so give it at least four hours or possibly wait overnight. If you are impatient, wash and prime some more figures.

The last comment on Gesso is avoid the temptation to take a big brush and glop it on. You need to go a little slower to avoid air bubbles. Air bubbles will mostly vanish as the stuff dries and shrinks, but there will be some pits left over in the crevices of the figure.



Painting: (2.5 hours)
This is the most time consuming step, and there isn't a lot I can say about techniques. Basically, put color on the parts you want color. There are still a couple of things that are useful to know:

1. Paint from the inside out. Start painting on the bits that are closest to the skin, then work your way out. For the Beastmen, I painted them in order of the skin, hair, loincloth, sandals, mouth, ears, eyes, teeth and fangs, and finally the little teddy bear at their crotch.
   
   
2. Choose your colors to be a little lighter in color than you think they should be. In general, really dark colors should be used only for accent pieces. The Magic Dip technique we are going to use to shade the figure isn't going to show up on dark areas. It is also going to darken the figure overall.
   
   
3. Paint one color at a time on all of your identical figures. It is a more tedious to paint via assembly line, but it is faster overall.
   
   
4. In general, flat paint everything for speed. In doing these Beastmen I screwed up and thinned my flesh tone too thin. Some of the gray primer showed through the flesh. So I let them dry a bit, mixed some of my flesh paint with white, very lightly put some on the brush, then lightly ran the brush over the raised areas of skin to paint them a slightly lighter color. The technique is called drybrushing or highlighting, and you can get some dramatic effects by doing a lot of it. You can also use drybrushing to paint details and accessories that stand out. I kind of tried to do that for the Soul Dolls, but you can see where my paint was too thin and ran.
   
   
5. Figure out how to stay within the lines. I'm not THAT great at doing so, but a couple of techniques are useful. You really don't have to worry about neatness while you are painting the bottom layers of the figure. In fact, you WANT to allow paint to edge over into the unpainted areas. It will help hide the seams when you paint those last areas.
   
   As you paint those last areas, you can kind of lay your brush on top of the area you are painting and slowly edge the paint towards the area you've already painted.

This last picture shows you how sloppy I've been while trying to do these quickly. There are quite a few small flash seams, especially around the outstretched arms and hands, the red sash around the middle one intrudes into the poor guy's abdomen, and the tiny details like the face and silver trim on the loincloth look pretty ragged. It'll look reasonably nice from a few feet away, though—especially after the next three steps.

(I still wonder why these feral men with fangs wear a teddy bear at crotch level. I have been informed by the designer Kevin Wilson that these are "soul dolls". As to whether Beastmen collect their kills' souls or whether their own souls are in the teddy bears, I haven't a clue.)

Flocking the Base: (30 minutes)
I didn't worry about painting the bases because I had other plans. Initially, those other plans were to leave the bases plain, but as Sandi looked at the figures, her only real comment was, "You *ARE* going to fix the bases, right?"

(At this point, a group of skeletons is going to join the photos. I ran these as a test before starting the photos to make sure that the paints and techniques all worked.)

Flocking refers to this weird substance made of tiny clumps of fluff that are glued onto the base of a figure to look like grass and turf. We're using rock, but the technique is pretty much the same.



The technique is simple:

1. Take your hobby knife and etch a dozen or so lines in the base. The PVA glue we are using is probably the best choice for this application, but it does not adhere THAT well to the non-porous plastic, so the lines will give it some extra surface to help it grip. The PVA does stick quite well to itself and to the talus.
   
   
2. Take a PVA glue (such as Elmer's or wood glue) and paint in onto the base THOROUGHLY to cover the entire surface. Then take the figure and roll it around in a small dish of tiny rocks. Shake the base a bit to dislodge any bits that are not very well stuck on, then let it set for at least two hours. Overnight is better, as the next step has some pretty caustic stuff.

Magic Dip: (15 minutes)
Magic Dip refers to Minwax Polyshades. This is a combination Polyurethane coating and stain. The technique is interesting because the stain part nestles in the cracks of the figure, and the coating sticks to everything and seals the paint job. It also helps adhere those bits of rock we just glued on.

Grab a decent-sized brush—I use 3/4" chip brushes that sell four-for-a-quarter—and coat the figure quickly. Paint the stuff liberally on the base; the rock will soak this stuff in, and the stain will provide some shading to the rock as well. I then use the edge of a paper towel or Q-tip to dab at any spots that have excessive stain. The elbow joints and hands on the Beastmen, for instance, attracted stain on these figures.

Cleanup for the Minwax requires mineral spirits. That's why I use the really cheap brushes. The stuff will also tend to get all over your hands if you are holding the miniature, so latex gloves might be a worthwhile investment.



Dullcoat: (2 minutes)
The nice thing about the Magic Dip is that it combines two steps and really seals the paint job and the gravel to the figure. The downside is that it is a fairly glossy finish. Testor's Dullcoat comes in a tiny little spray can for $4-5 and can be found in hobby stores along with the plastic models.

The stuff is very, very flat, and almost perfectly clear. It dries in about 30 minutes and removes the gloss.


© 2007 Frank Branham

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Comments:

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Thanks for taking the time to document this.  I’m in the process of making my Hirst Arts tile set, but I don’t think I’d be able to find the patience to paint all my figures! Posted by Kevin Wood on Aug 9, 2007 at 08:37 AM | #

People can find a few pictures of Alan’s 3D Descent tiles and D&D minis mentioned by Frank on the following picture album pages from the recent Gulf Games: Session 1 starts on page 5: http://www.rozmiarek.info/gallery/GulfGames20?page=5 Session 2 (with Frank) is on page 17: http://www.rozmiarek.info/gallery/GulfGames20?page=17 Posted by Ed Rozmiarek on Aug 9, 2007 at 09:43 AM | #

Magic Dip...sounds interesting.  I have absolutely no experience or skill painting anything, so I’ll have to keep that in mind when/if I decide to try anything like this. I *have* been painting my Heroscape castle sets recently, though.  I just used a simple mix of water and Future floor polish, with craft paint mixed in for color.  I just gave them a quick wash and dab dry type application, and they came out mostly decent.  Sure, about a quarter of the pieces came out WAY too dark, as I was experimenting, trying to find the right ratio of water:Future, but all in all, I can’t complain.  An all-in-one type solution like the Minwax would’ve been nice. Posted by Jon Theys on Aug 9, 2007 at 11:12 AM | #

I figure about 80 hours to paint the puppies, and I rather enjoy painting. I am much of the way through my Hirst Arts tile set. I’ve built and painted the tiles and pieces for the basic game and expansion sets. I’m working on some of the extra pieces---potion bottles, gates, and water, mud, and lava tiles. Bruce is due to give us a dungeon accessories mold in a couple of weeks, otherwise I may venture into making a custom mold for some of those. If I can’t work out anything better for next week, I’ll post pics of my tiles.  I’m also considering jumping to flocking gel for the bases. This is a kind of paint filled with plastic grit. Mix in paint for color and brush on. Might adhere better than the Talus. Posted by Frank Branham on Aug 9, 2007 at 12:51 PM | #

Couple additional comments ... Games Workshop now has a line of “foundation” paints, which are basically paints with lots and lots of pigment. For most of the colors in the line it’s not that big a deal, but it does wonders with yellows, reds, and orange. You can get great coverage and strong colors with one pass, even over a black base coat, whereas with traditional hobby paints I’ve found yellows to be very hard if not impossible to work with, even over a white base coat, and strong reds that don’t look chalky are not easy either. The new foundation paints have let me do stuff with brighter colors that I wouldn’t have bothered with in the past. Also, while I like the colors in the Games Workshop paint line, and they are great for fantasy figs, I’ve switched over to Reaper’s paints almost completely now. The Master Series paints are great as they are grouped into triads to make layering and shading easier (not an issue with this simpler technique, obviously) and they have a very wide range of useful colors, while the ProPaints are cheap, and seem to have a slightly thicker consistency which gets good results when drybrushing, another good technique for turning out lots of models quickly. Posted by Chris Farrell on Aug 29, 2007 at 03:02 PM | #

One issue I’ve always had with GW paints is the drying time. I’ve yet to venture into the Foundation series, mostly because I’ve heard they dry faster. I like to mix my colors on a palette, and GW paints seem to dry on the palette before I can apply them, even with a drying retarder. I’m drifting towards liquid artist acrylics myself. Slower drying times, a bit thinner than GW, and heavily pigmented paints. Posted by Frank Branham on Aug 29, 2007 at 03:40 PM | #