Overview

For the last 2+ years, we've been showing you various ways and means to paint miniatures. We've even gone back and covered some of the very basics, how to Prep and Assemble Minis in Miniatures 101 and Shading and Highlighting in Miniatures 102. So for my article this week, I thought I would compile some of the accumulated knowledge available on this site and create Miniatures 103 — Putting It All Together. I'm going to take a single miniature from primer to a finished state and show you each and every step I take. I'll warn you now, this will take a LOT of photos to wade through, so if you get bored easily or have a slow 'net connection, this might not be the article for you.

Paint Selection

For this article I'll be using primarily Privateer's new P3 paints. I realize that most of you may not have these available to you yet, so if you want to try and replicate my work here you'll have to find suitable substitutes. I tried to work out some easy equivalents for the colors I use, but most involved mixing 2 or more colors in order to get a reasonable match so you're going to be on your own there.

Paint List

• P3 Morrow White
• P3 Thamar Black
• P3 Khardic Flesh
• P3 Midlund Flesh
• P3 Thornwood Green
• P3 Pig Iron
• P3 Greatcoat Grey
• P3 Ironhull Grey
• P3 Battlefield Brown
• P3 Gun Corps Brown
• P3 Bloodstone
• P3 Khador Red Base
• P3 Khador Red Highlight
• P3 Cryx Bane Highlight
• VMC 191 Metal Medium
• Higgins Brown Ink
• Higgins Purple Ink
• Higgins Blue Ink
• Higgins Carmine Ink
• GW Black Ink
• YW7 Grunge

Model Selection

Looking about for a suitable victim, erm, "subject", I came across my Khador Mechanik. I had gussied up his base a while back as he is going to be the personal Mechanik for my Karchev. He's got metal, skin, leather, fur, and I really like the sculpt. The face is so expressive. He looks like he's worried about a warjack that is about to be scrapped to me. Perfect. I'm just going to paint the Mechanik for this article, not the base. We've got plenty of basing article to cover that.

He's been primed using my weapon of choice: Dupli-color Flat Black Sandable Primer and then I've touched up any bare spots using a 1:1 mix of black paint and black ink.

Basecoats, or "Blocking In"

Normally I will work a section or color until it's complete and then move on rather than blocking in all of the colors. Since I'm showing each of the basic processes involved in painting a mini, it will be easier to follow if I do all of each stage at the same time.

I prefer to work from the skin of a mini outward. This is usually the best way to approach things if you're not sure, as outer garments are easier to hit with a brush without getting paint onto surrounding areas than small bits of exposed skin. So, following that logic, I start with my base skintone, P3 Khardic Flesh. This will cover black in one pass if you want it to, but I want to make sure that I preserve all of the fine details in the sculpt so I elect to do it in two thin passes. I've thinned the paint with water just to the point where it's wanting to run everywhere. Then I tap my brush against a paper towel just before touching the mini to unload some of the moisture. It's a tricky balancing act, but once you've practiced it a few times you'll get the "feel" of how a paint will act.

 Now for the metals. Pig Iron is *awesome* in my opinion. It has great coverage over black, lays down very smooth and stays wet much longer on my palette. It has completely replaced GW Boltgun for me as my "go to" metal. I hit all of the metal pieces on the mini. I'm not seeing anything on the sculpt that would warrant it being gold, so it's just Pig Iron this time.

Continuing to work outward from the skin, the next areas are the vest and pants. My Khador force uses a darker grey as its predominant color, so I'll use Greatcoat Grey as the base color here. Make sure your paint is thin enough to flow down into recesses like the pockets on the vest, but not so thin that it runs everywhere the second the brush touches the mini. If you're unsure, try this trick: You can get a quick feel for how thick or thin your paint is by painting a thin line on your thumbnail.

 Next comes the red armor. Normally red will take multiple passes to build up enough coverage over black primer to look red. You can offset this by painting a basecoat of a mid brown first, and then painting your red over that. This isn't really necessary when using Khador Red Base, but I still like to use brown as a base color for my reds. I paint a thin coat of Bloodstone and then a thin coat of Khador Red Base for solid coverage.

 Now for the chaps and glove. I want these to look like worn leather, so I'll base them using Battlefield Brown.

Last, but not least, I have the fur trim. For this I'll use Cryx Bane Highlight as there's not really a light neutral grey in the P3 lineup yet. It has a bit of an olive cast, but I can offset that later with a wash. I also clean up the black base for the moustache and paint the eye sockets black.

My Mechanik is looking pretty good at this point. He's perfectly playable on the table (with the base painted of course.) Nice, clean colors, a few bits of detail, and lots of character. I'm certainly not going to leave him here though...