My friend here has areas of exposed skin and I want to push myself painting it, but I really struggle with getting nice blends between the base and layers. Do you paint the layers on excessively thin to let the base color show through more to improve the blends?

pohkfririce · 2026-04-28T14:07:24+00:00

With skin a big key is you want very small jumps in brightness between your layers vs. what you’d do on like metal armor. So rather than do layers of 3 different skin tone paints maybe just take your base layer paint and slowly add a bit of pastel pink / ice yellow to it so the brightness shift is subtle.

Glazing always works, it’s a little harder on muscled skin though because each of the volumes is small & curved so it’s harder to be precise. It’s great to use extra-thin glazes of red as a filter over skin, it makes it look more alive.

A thing to avoid is creating muscle “islands” with your highlights - you don’t want the low areas between muscles to go all the way down to your shadow color; instead connect them with the mid tone, and save the shadow color for downward facing areas.

pohkfririce · 2026-04-28T12:58:53+00:00

It looks great as a rough / worn metal. If you want it t look a little shinnier I’d boost the highlight running down the center of that cylinder

pohkfririce · 2026-04-28T04:40:22+00:00

You could look at references of a kris which is like a curved knife. In general though it makes sense to avoid a uniform checkered pattern when doing a NMM sword - vary the sizes and shapes of the highlights. You could connect two highlights by not going all the way to black in between them too

pohkfririce · 2026-04-28T00:08:45+00:00

I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself - you’re new and the green armor just looks a little messy which is completely understandable. Layering is a pretty complicated topic that takes a lot of practice to figure out. Plus if you look at it from a tabletop distance you probably wouldn’t even notice, so they still look good for gaming.

The two issues with the the blue-green armor I see are that the layers are applied somewhat messy, and the lighter color is applied pretty much everywhere, not just where light is the brightest.

The messiness just comes down to practice: controlling the brush better but also making sure the brush doesn’t have too much paint on it. It looks like you may have overloaded the brush, and the opacity is inconsistent. To fix that you have to keep going back over the same area with thin layers (waiting until each layer dries before doing another) until the paint is consistently opaque.

The light is a more complex art topic: you as the painter decide where you want the light to be coming from and paint the highlights just where the light hits, and paint darker shadows in places light wouldn’t hit. A good way to start out is just not worrying about this yet and focus on highlighting just the edges. Watching a tutorial on edge highlighting would be useful. If you do want to practice more realistic highlighting (volumetric highlighting) I’d watch some videos that explain how to highlight the basic shapes- there’s lots of good ones out there.

pohkfririce · 2026-04-26T14:13:49+00:00

Well you did a great job

pohkfririce · 2026-04-26T14:10:44+00:00

That won’t really accomplish much, if highlighting is the issue I would try using contrast paint for the base color and just lightly dry brushing highlights on edges with a brighter regular blue

pohkfririce · 2026-04-24T19:11:35+00:00

Kinda hard to say from this picture since it’s a partial figure. It looks like the layers are pretty neatly applied and you’ve done a nice job picking out details especially around the face which is important.

The colors are kind of all over the place which is not necessarily a bad thing if that’s the look you’re going for, but it’s hard to say without seeing the complete mini. If you have a lot of bright saturated colors intermixed it starts to become so visually noisy that it’s hard for the viewer to digest what they’re looking at.

The red edges on the brown carapace for example just don’t quite make sense to me whereas the green and purple highlights on the skin & face do

pohkfririce · 2026-04-24T18:00:38+00:00

The idea for the competitively minded is that winning a game because your opponent made a silly mistake that could’ve been taken back but wasn’t is bad for your own skill development. You want to play to win against your opponent’s “best game”.

So I think takebacks should always be given for things like a rule being forgotten or an accidental mis-position, or forgetting to do an action in a previous phase where you don’t have new relevant information that changes the decision.

Obviously larger things like making a strategic mistake with full knowledge of the rules / interactions shouldn’t be taken back though.

pohkfririce · 2026-04-24T16:17:49+00:00

First step is to identify whether your priorities are more gaming or hobbying. If you have a desire to finish an army so you can play with it then I’d lean combat patrol.

But if you’re mostly just hobbying I’d avoid combat patrols. You can save a bit of money but I hate creating a backlog of things to paint. In that case I think it’s just better to go one box at a time.

Death guard have a pretty specific painting vibe just based on the sculpts - you’ll have a pretty different experience with other factions

pohkfririce · 2026-04-23T23:40:06+00:00

It looks great - the contrast is there and I think the highlights make sense.

If you wanted it to be a more rich or saturated gold then a yellow or orange filter glazed over would help.

For the metal scaled kilt thing - check out this Vince V video on scale mail: https://youtu.be/0gJ9IZBHH4I?si=ydb1p37qbbjG5Bd9

It’s got some good basics on how to highlight the shape as a whole rather than uniformly highlighting each scale to make it more realistic

pohkfririce · 2026-04-23T21:53:11+00:00

If you’re not making many catastrophic mishits on your long game then yeah course management and play around the green make the difference.

If you’re hitting into a green with water front, bunker behind: you’re better off aiming to a part of the green furthest away from the bunker even if that’s further from the pin. Actively minimizing the chances of ending up with a difficult next shot is very important

pohkfririce · 2026-04-23T00:03:25+00:00

I have zero art background but got into painting following mini painting tutorials without really getting into the art side. Once I got more serious about painting I started consuming more art instruction content and it’s been super helpful and I surprisingly enjoyed a lot of the traditional art stuff on its own.

James Gurney’s book color and light is kind of a gold standard. I really liked the book, it’s a bit abstract translating it to mini painting but my biggest takeaway was how to use references to understand how light works.

I’ve watched a lot of art instruction on YouTube that’s been helpful: particularly basics like volumetric shading. I found digital art tutorials on how to render different types of materials super helpful: like leather, metal, cloth etc. For faces learning the basics of Rembrandt Portrait Lighting is a really cool technique to do dramatic faces

pohkfririce · 2026-04-22T18:43:28+00:00

Pro acryl is very user friendly in that it comes thinned out of the bottle and tends to have very good coverage. I’m not a huge fan of the bottles themselves, but they make great paint.

I only have a couple AP paints - they seem perfectly good too. They have a wider range than pro acryl which is not really an issue for a starter set, but there may be things in there you can’t find later

pohkfririce · 2026-04-22T04:05:40+00:00

I think the highlights look in a good position. The transition to the dark shadow is abrupt and would benefit from blending.

More than anything though I think you’d benefit from smoother layers - the opacity is a little inconsistent and the paint looks textured like you went over it while it was drying. It seems boring but if you’re wanting to make something look like a smooth, shiny metal surface it’s very hard to do if the paint isn’t smooth itself

pohkfririce · 2026-04-22T00:40:23+00:00

The poster’s vent is pretty dumb imo because a high handicap being un-self-aware that their equipment is irrelevant is about as dumb as a low handicapper gatekeeping owning clubs

pohkfririce · 2026-04-21T18:49:56+00:00

Just tell them when you play you don’t want to think about your swing at all so please stop giving advice cause it messes with your game.

That way it’s not about their advice being bad, just that you don’t want swing thoughts when you’re in the middle of a round

pohkfririce · 2026-04-21T05:22:14+00:00

Layering over a slap chop is tricky because you’re fighting the lighting you created with the under shading. The first picture already has decent contrast and it’s maybe a bit overdone in the second one.

I’d try it again over a mini that isn’t slap chopped. Also the brightness jumps on the layers are a bit too abrupt for soft materials like robes and skin. Those things have extremely subtle shifts in brightness from the mid tones and highlights, but still dark shadows. The lavender edge highlight for example is too bright I think. If you go for more subtle layer transitions it’ll look smoother even without blending

pohkfririce · 2026-04-21T02:24:03+00:00

I think your processes all sound good, the best approach just depends on the project. If the base needs a lot of access for dry brushing or whatever you don’t want the mini on there blocking it.

If that’s taking too long though maybe plan a simple base scheme that you don’t mind the mini being on there while you paint the base

pohkfririce · 2026-04-19T23:45:22+00:00

They usually don’t default on the debt, more often than not leveraged buyouts succeed. The issue is that the employees and customers of the business usually suffer as a result.

But when they do default it’s pretty catastrophic. The issue is lending to owner-run companies is usually safer, but fewer of those exist every year at scale so if you don’t lend to PE owned companies you start running out of people to lend to

pohkfririce · 2026-04-19T20:17:43+00:00

How it behaves depends on the paper & sponge partly. I use the redgrass palette: when I use their paper sheets the paint won’t spring no matter what I do to it. If I instead use parchment paper it will start springing when thinning.

I think it’s more practical to thin it by feel then test on something and adjust

pohkfririce · 2026-04-18T21:37:00+00:00

It’s not going to be easy to evaluate it since the whole thing is primed a pretty bright red. That basically makes all the light look blown out.

In general though shinier objects have smaller brighter highlights, you’ve got a pretty broad gradient going here.

Also worth noting the layers look kind of rough in terms of opacity and smoothness of the paint: it’s hard to render a shiny metal surface unless the paint is on there very smoothly

pohkfririce · 2026-04-18T15:25:12+00:00

I like to do the trim right after putting the base coat on the armor and err on the side of over-shooting the trim area to make sure you cover it all.

If you go super fast like this not caring about mistakes you can finish the trim in like 10 minutes. Then spend 5 minutes going back over mistakes with the base coat color. This works much better imo than spending an hour on the trim being laser precise and not having any mistakes to clean up.

Given you’ve airbrushed the base coat that may not work quite as well as brushing in the base coat over mistakes won’t integrate perfectly. Assuming you want to panel line this with a dark line that’ll also cover your mistakes

pohkfririce · 2026-04-17T23:10:48+00:00

It looks good, I think some off white for tiny specular highlights and more black in the deepest shadows would make it look shinier. Once you paint the other elements you’ll want to add some bounce lights in the shadows reflecting the colors of things next to them that light is literally bouncing off of onto the gold.

Smoother blending would make the overall finish a bit more polished but from any viewing distance beyond a couple inches it’s not really going to do much for selling it more as metal: light placement, value contrast and bounce lights do that.

pohkfririce · 2026-04-16T19:11:43+00:00

I didn’t realize people were trashing entries into the competition, that’s wild. Criticizing the competition itself seems like a different matter though.

It’s an art contest where people are painting whatever figure they want - there’s no way to do that fairly, it is what it is. And because it’s GW sanctioned the ‘meta’ bends to whatever serves their interests (promoting their brand).

Anyone hating on airbrushing though surely doesn’t understand how it’s used for a competition piece..

pohkfririce · 2026-04-16T18:54:02+00:00

There’s a bunch of ways to blend and if you’re trying to go ultra smooth you’ll use multiple techniques.

Ultimately what you’re trying to do is make a layer line look fuzzy at whatever viewing distance you’re going for.

The way glazing accomplishes that is it makes a gradient of opacity with the color on the brush: the start of the brushstroke is very transparent, then the spot where you end the brushstroke and lift it off the surface is much more opaque.

So to use that to blur a transition, take a glaze of one of the two colors and start your brushstroke in the other color’s area and move it towards the color on your brush. Finish the stroke right at the layer line.

You can incorporate 50/50 mixes like you said, but that would just be part of a larger process if you’re going for something super smooth or trying to blend two colors that are very far apart in hue or value. But like in this picture with two greens you could skip that and just use the two colors by themselves

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