First time touching paints in ages, and first time ever doing a miniature. Been having a lot of fun painting the starter kit after work. I’d like to try shading when I finish them all up.
I was struggling a lot with the first layer since the paint wouldn’t stick, so I got a Tamiya primer for the space Marines. I think I may have over sprayed a bit since there’s some paint that was pooling in the pauldrons.
I’ve also had trouble getting to some of the tighter spots on the model, especially the 4 guys on one base (the book is in japanese so I don’t know the names). Nevertheless having lots of fun! Looking forward to making a kill team or doing one of the board games since I don’t have anyone to play with out here.
4 guys on one base: These are the tiny Tyranid models, correct? Those are called Ripper Swarms. The model in your picture is a Termagant.
Thanks for letting me know! The ripper swarm had some really tight places to try to fit the brush.
There are many way to go about painting minis, but for almost all of them priming is the first step.
You can use hobby paint or even cheaper hardware store paint. When spray priming don’t just sit there hosing the mini, do quick light passes across the minis from different angles.
With tyranids you’re going to want to immediately get in the habit of painting batches of minis rather than one at a time.
You can choose any color you want to prime, but black is a pretty conventional choice. It is a forgiving color if you don’t fully paint all the crevices and undersides later.
Drybrushing is a great way to quickly get color on. You can use a hobby drybrush or a cheap cosmetics brush. A couple of drybrush passes with your creamer color over black can get you surprisingly good coverage.
That’s just one of many options. You could go another way by putting a wash all over the flesh (I think a red or purple wash would look suitably gross on the models). You could also go for contrast paints, which I’m not a fan of using for all purposes but for the fleshy looks of tyranids may be quite successful.
Thanks for the tips! I’ll definitely look into those techniques. I’ve seen some videos on contrast paints, but “wash” and “drybrush” are new to me.
Washing and drybrushing are some very basic techniques used with traditional paints, but can also be used on contrast paints. The basics with them can be expanded on and combined with other techniques, but knowing at least about them will give some options.
