14th Grand Company

Not sure how many of you follow the lifehacker.com blog but they just posted a great link to an article on how to take great close-up shots. For all of us this is very fitting since we are continuously taking pictures of our small plastic men.

Lifehacker link

Instructables Link

Another quick tip for painting: using brush soap to clean your brushes.

I picked up this tip from the manager of my local GW store. I had been having trouble with my brushes getting stiff and clogged. I know I should be washing my brushes with soap and water after each session but sometimes I just don’t want to be bothered or don’t have the time.

That is where this little dish of soap comes in handy: simple dip the brush in the water pot, wipe it across the soap a few time and rinse it again. While using this method I haven’t had any problems with dried paint in my brush and in fact older brushes cleaned up so well with this, they were actually usable again.

I picked up my soap at a local art supply shop but I’m sure any bar of soap could work, this is just in a handy, closable case.

Although I’m trying hard to finish 1k of my traitor guard by the end of the month I thought I would also share some of the painting tips and tricks I often use.

Today’s Tip: The magic eraser brush.

Whenever I’m painting I always have two brushes out: the one I’m using and another to erase. The need for the second brush arises because I don’t like to do touch up painting and my hands shake a bit. To solve both of these problems I have a second, clean brush always on hand that I can quickly wet and “erase” any spots of paint I put on the wrong spot.

This technique is not completely fail proof but it usually removes enough paint to make it unnoticeable. The trick is to wipe the paint away as soon as possible with a wet brush. If you wait to long or use a dry brush the paint will no longer come off easily. I prefer to use a large, stiff brush for this, such as the medium dry brush, because it both springs into the cracks a bit better and grabs the edges harder than softer brushes.

For my traitor guard I have used this technique many times to remove spots of orange on metal parts or metal on skin areas (though the metal paints often leave a touch of aluminum shavings no matter how hard you try). Because of this I have had to do nearly no touch up.

This week it is in the upper 90s here in the PNW and I know there are much hotter places in the world, but it hardly ever reach the 80s here in Seattle, let-alone the upper 90s. Because of this my apartment isn’t set up with air conditioning. This means two things hobby-wise: I’m staying up much later since I can’t sleep and am able to get more painting done, and my paint dries out faster than normal. When doing the washes this is actually a benefit as I can paint the next coat not long after painting the first. The problem though is when putting some paint down on my pallet, I am adding water between each model to keep it liquid. This is causing me to struggle keeping a good paint-to-water mix so my question is this to my fellow hobbyist in the warm/dry climates: what do you add to your paint to keep it from drying out quickly?

So this morning I finished one more base color on 5 of my traitor guard. I was a bit intimidated by the fact that I have 50+ guardsmen to paint and I don’t often get hour stretches to paint. My solution: paint a little, often. Such as this morning, I had 10 extra minutes before having to leave for work, so I grabbed my brush and painted the boots, belts and any other dark gray part on 5 more guys. Sure I have 10 more in this platoon to paint that same gray on, but it is 5 less I have to do later.
Painting a little, often also will help keep my painting skills up. Its been a few months since I did any painting, and I can tell. I’m a little less steady, not as good at mixing the right water to paint ratio, and generally slower. I have plenty of projects to paint, so even when I get new projects in the mail (the sentinels are next) I will continue to paint a little, often.