Pill Tray Paint Palette

 

I've been casting about for ages for a paint palette with very small reservoirs, suitable for very small quantities of paint.

I completely overlooked this: my used pill trays.

Thanks to my ever-increasing decrepitude, I have a never-ending supply of them, and they're perfect for my purposes — compact, disposable, and white. 

Vallejo Xpress

 

Vallejo Xpress is another entry into the colour glaze "speed-paint" style of mini paints.

I noticed them on the rack when I went in to my FLGS  for some normal Vallejo paint, and thought I'd give them a try in my constant search for hobby materials that cater to my laziness.

They work decently well, though there's nothing startling about them. They dry to a glossier finish than Army Painter Speedpaints, but otherwise seem pretty similar.

The part-painted hag in between the two bottles is FDM printed at 75mm size, and not very well printed at that. FDM isn't well suited to colour glazing, as its layer lines are quite apparent. Plus, my printer is a bit out of whack, and I'm getting a fair amount of stringing and blobbing.

Speed-paint glazes, of any manufacturer, are fine if all you want is a quick and okay paint-job, but they're really not a one-and-done solution. If you want a really decent paint job, they're still just a starting point. They work best on models with plenty of well-incised surface detail. However, they're useful for what they are. 

They're a bit tricky to mix reliably, but not impossible.  I assume they'd need the appropriate glaze medium for extending if you want to lower the intensity of the base colour; I haven't experimented with plain water, but I think it would tend to interfere with the paint's pooling and self-levelling qualities.

The skulls on the bottle caps are FDM printed from a file I got on Thingiverse; they provide me with a good visual indication of what's going to come straight out of the bottle. They're just stuck in place with a blob of blu-tak in a socket underneath.

Germanic Test Painting

I've been trying to find a set of pre-mixed paints that I'm satisfied with for painting my 15mm WWII German foot-sloggers and artillerymen. They've almost always turned out too dark, sometimes too light.

This bloke, a Command Decision 15mm artilleryman with a binocular rangefinder, I base-coated in Vallejo ModelColor 759 German Tank Crew, and then dry-brushed (or moist-brushed really) fairly heavily with 886 Grey Green. I added an overall wash of Citadel Agrax Earthshade (my favourite), which darkened everything a tad, and then came back in with 886 again for the highlights.

This method gives me a field grey that I'm satisfied with. I know that German field grey is a vague and uncertain colour anyway, but I do want something that looks good to me.

I could have done the base coat in 830 German Field Grey, which is tonally similar to 759, but warmer. Once the wash has gone on, I doubt that it would make much difference.
 

Enamel Washes

 

I've been trying out a couple of AK Interactive's enamel washes/colours.

They have the advantage that you don't have to mix any colours, so there's easier consistency, but otherwise I don't see any benefit over old-school oil washes (oil paint thinned with white spirit), which are both cheaper and more flexible. Plus, the AK enamels' working time is less than with an oil wash. 

I doubt that I'll be using the two that I have very much, and I won't be buying any more. 

Dropper Palette

 

I had a desire for a small paint palette with quite small recesses, for inks and pin-washes and the like, something that could be cleaned out, and wouldn't take up too much space on my modelling desk.

I could not find anything suitable ready-made, so I whipped one up out of oven-bake polymer clay.

The 19mm ball-bearing headed stylus I used to press out the paint recesses came from a cheap paper quilling set that I saw for about ten bucks, and grabbed because I thought they might come in handy. As they have.

I would have preferred pure white polymer clay, but this pale pink was the closest I could come without shopping around further, and laziness triumphed.

Army Painter Speedpaints

 

At long last I've got my hands on some of these new-fangled SpeedPaint colour glazes from Army Painter.

The figures are a pair of 3d printed 32mm barbarians by Fat Dragon Games; they print in FDM without supports.  I've primed one in a sandy colour (left), and the other in white (right).

The SpeedPaints went on without any issues, and they do a decent job of staining the underlying colour and darkening recesses. If you can sort out the right colours, they would certainly make painting figures quite speedy.

However, actually finding the right colours is going to be largely a matter of trial and error, as the labels on the bottles give only a very general impression of what the paint will end up looking like, and in common with almost all hobby paint ranges, the paint names are of very limited usefulness.

Being glazes, the underlying colour is very important in determining the final outcome. They recommend either white or grey, which is fair enough. The sand colour worked okay with these two colours, though the final contrast levels are a lot lower than the pure white underlay. It would be worth while to do some tests on a variety of primer colours to see how they react.

The paints would be very useful for production-line painting of mooks, but I think they'd be of more limited usefulness when it comes to fine painting. I'd happily use them for pumping out masses of wargaming figures — assuming I can figure out which colours I actually need for historicals.

15mm Afrika Korps paint test

Collage of various internet stuff

I'm not great at painting 15mm figures, but I do like them to look at least half-way believable.

So, I occasionally force myself to do some research.

Fortunately, these days the internet provides plenty of material to look at — though it can be of variable reliability, since it is subject to reenactment fads and AI bullshit.

Looks like an Osprey illustration to me

This is the method I've settled on that seems to work for me:

Primed with Green Brown surface primer

Then 914 Green Ochre for the uniform base coat.

Just Buff for the trousers. I'll use Iraqi Sand for the helmets and other painted metal.

After lightly dry-brushing with Bone White for highlights, and washing overall with Agrax Earthshade, another wash on just the jacket with Athonian Camoshade greens it up a bit without making it too bright.

Dropper Bottle Paint Racks

 

This is a stackable shelf module, 190mm wide, designed to fit standard 25mm diameter dropper bottles such as those used by Vallejo or AK Interactive.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6006265

It is not a complete one-step shelving solution. The modules will need to be glued together, and the whole set will need to be secured to a base-plate of some kind to keep it from tipping over. Depending on the number of layers, some support for the rearmost shelves may also be necessary.

I've included bottom and top shelf STLs — they're not strictly necessary, but they make a more compact unit.

I've also included STLs for some bracing pillars for the back shelves, in heights to fit one, two or three levels. If a higher brace is required, two of the shorter ones can be glued together.

Edit 2023-05-05:

I've now added a pair of stepped brackets that tip the whole shelf assembly forward by about 20 degrees, reducing the depth of the whole thing and making it more compact.

The bottles are still held securely in their collars and by the lipped shelf beneath.

And Lo!

It works very well. There are a few hours of printing there (about twenty for this many shelves) but then it's not as if 3d printing is a labour-intensive affair.

I'll probably replace that hardboard one to the left of it at some stage, partly for consistency, but mainly because with my 3d printed version I can get an extra 50% paint storage space for the same footprint.

German WWII Desert Colours

 

I've been stocking up on Vallejo airbrush colours for WWII German desert vehicles. I've got into the habit of spraying colour swatches like these when I get some new paints, so that I can see what the colour is actually like, and to record the RAL numbers and vallejo's own designations. The pages are A5 (148 x 210 mm).

Recent research has meant that the colours of WWII-era paints can be much more accurately replicated these days, which is a fine thing, but when it comes to paint in the desert there's not that much point in being too anal about it. Except, of course, for the nerdy satisfaction one gets from knowing that the colours are as accurate as one can manage.

In real life, the effects of sun-fading and wind-blown sand-blasting means that paints didn't stay fresh for long. Add to that the fact that Rommel's troops were using up old stocks of paint, or using stocks of British or Italian or American paints, and there are very wide ranges of shades any given tank or gun or truck might appear in. Even within a single unit, different vehicles might look quite different in tone.

However that might be, I like to have an accurate starting point. All the real-life variation to the side, I think that that phenomenon is often just used as an excuse for lazy modeling, because I am a judgemental dick.

Long-Term Error

 

I have just realised, after all these years, that I've been painting the 7th Armoured "Desert Rat" jerboa insignia wrong. I've been painting it with its tail curled up around its back, not under its feet.

Fortunately, in 1:100 (15mm) it looks pretty much like a red squiggle inside a white circle, and nobody is very likely to notice unless they look at it through a magnifying glass, but I'll know my secret shame.

The photo is of a PSC 15mm M3 Stuart.

Challenger (in progress)

 

Next project is a 15mm (1:100) Challenger. Not the modern Challenger, the descendent of Chieftain, but the WWII Challenger, the 17 pounder variant of the Cromwell. Once again I made the gun barrel from a length of 2mm brass rod, tapered down and provided with locating pins on my cheap (and fairly pathetic) little mini-lathe. I would have liked to have been able to turn the muzzle-brake in place rather than having to glue on a separate piece, but my lathe isn't anywhere near that precise.

I have printed this model by the estimable Mr Bergman before, in FDM, but at that time my Ender 3 printer was in the process of crapping itself, and I got a bit of layer shifting. I've thrown this print away now.

As it turned out, while I was looking for the Cromwell (below) I discovered that I'd printed another FDM Challenger more successfully, and completely forgotten about it, so I've got a couple of Challengers available on the very small chance that I'll ever need more than one for any game I'll be playing.

I wanted to see how the Challenger looked alongside the Cromwell, in this case a 1:100 PSC plastic kit. It's certainly quite stretched out, and it's tall compared with the Cromwell, but it wouldn't be any taller than a Sherman Firefly, the Brits' other 17pdr gun tank option at the time.

I've primed the Challenger model with Vallejo British Bronze Green surface primer.

The Challenger was intended to work with Cromwell troops, and by being built on what was essentially a lengthened Cromwell chassis, to minimise the logistics impact of having two different types working in the same unit. Also, the Cromwell was a pretty speedy tank, and the Firefly would have had quite a job to keep up with them. Not to mention that a Firefly would stand out to enemy observation even more in a Cromwell troop than they did with other Shermans.

The next stage is to apply the top coat, ready for markings and weathering.

The colour I use for late-war British stuff is VMC Russian Uniform, and it's applied by airbrush one panel at a time. I'm not aiming at even, solid coating, but rather apply the paint in a sort of mottle pattern from the centre of each panel out to near the edge, building it up in thin layers until it looks okay.

The panel edges are then highlighted by dry-brushing with VMC Buff.

Decals and/or markings will go on before any further weathering, so that they don't look too bright at the end of the process.

The finished piece can be seen here.

Modeling U.S. Olive Drab — harder than I expected

 

WWII U.S. Olive Drab should be simple, but it's really not.

It was composed of just two pigments: ochre and black. However, the word "ochre" is not a precise one at all.

In his Military Modelling magazine article back in 2002, Steve Zaloga went into the subject in reasonable depth, and the pre-mixed colour he recommended above all others back then was Tamiya XF-62, with no others even coming close to the WWII-era paint chips he was comparing against.

I figured that mixing it from VMC acrylics would just be a matter of getting the right proportions of yellow ochre and black, but all of those mixes ended up much more grey than the sample swatch of XF-62 I sprayed, which has a perceptibly warm brown cast. Of them all, the 3:2 yellow ochre : black mix seems to be closest in tone, but as I said, it's too grey.

The Vallejo surface primer described as "US Olive Drab" is actually much closer to the 5:1 mix, which is a long way from XF-62, and a long way from WWII colour photographs I've seen.

The search continues.

A bit later...

I found a bottle of VMC 889 USA Olive Drab, which is much browner than the Tamiya, more like a burnt umber. However, it might do okay as a base coat, with panel shading airbrushed over the top in 887 Brown Violet, which was recommended to me. The 887 is pretty good in hue, though it's considerably lighter in tone, which is probably a good thing when it comes to scale effects and the general effect of dust and sun on the paint.

Even later...

I tried a base coat of 889 Olive Drab, highlighted with the airbrush with 887 Brown Violet, and it gave me a result I quite like. So I think this will be my process for US equipment, which might come in handy for  Battlegroup:Westwall when it finally appears.

I did the stars with Tamiya masking tape, laboriously cut out with a scalpel, and if somebody was to provide sheets of die-cut masking tape stars and roundels, that person would get my money. Oh yes they would.

The model is actually a British Mk.I with sand shields and turret bustle, so not 100% right, but it'll do me for testing purposes. When I need them, I'll print some proper Yank tanks.

Much later....

It's probably a bit pointless, since I've found some pre-mixed paints that work for me, but I thought I'd try a mix with a different ochre and see how that turned out.

In this case, I used Maimeri Polycolor (gouache acrylic) Raw Sienna and Black, and got tones that seem a lot less grey than those I got with yellow ochre. The proportions are quite tricky to manage with tube acrylics though, especially with small quantities of paint.

The left-hand swatch is roughly 1:1, but the others are all rather indeterminate. I think the right-hand one is around 4:1, but I'm really just guessing.

And even later...

I've discovered that Vallejo already do a pre-mixed US Olive Drab in their ModelAir range (#71043 Olive Drab) which is just about perfect.

And not only that, but I already had a bottle of it in my Big Pile O' Paints.

So, that was a whole lot of wasted effort.

Holder for Citadel Paint Pots

 

I don't use Citadel paints, except for their washes. Agrax Earthshade, Athonian Camoshade, and Nuln Oil are the main ones I favour, though I occasionally also use Seraphim Sepia (which isn't sepia at all).

The pots are easily knocked over, and the lids don't reliably stay open on their own.

I whipped this up in Blender, based on a design that I saw on the internet somewhere. It addresses both of those issues.

The broad splayed base keeps the pot stable, and the upright tab keeps the lid open. It's designed to take the larger pot size as well as the little 18ml ones, though I've heard a rumour that now that Citadel have reformulated their wash recipes, they might be discontinuing the larger (better value) size. I hope not.

The stand could do with a bit of refinement though — the upright is about 10mm taller than it needs to be, so that's just wasted printing time and filament.

Aussie M13/40

 

I finally got around to testing out my method for painting the Aussie kangaroo that they painted on their captured equipment, and I'm reasonably happy with the results.

This is a 1:100 scale M-13/40, printed on my Mars Pro. The figure is a very old one from Battlefront.

I just realised that the kangaroo on the starboard side of the turret should be going the other way. Oh well, too late now. Somebody at the depot will get a bollocking.

OT-130 — the Paintening Proceeds

 

The time has come to start decorating my 15mm 3d printed OT-130 (or XT-130, or KhT-130). I was originally going to paint it in winter white, but as it turns out, the Soviets didn't feel the need to indulge in anything as cowardly or effeminate as camouflage when they decided to try to kick the shit out of the Finns, so generic Russian green it is.

Plain green is pretty boring, so I'm bashing the crap out of the paintwork. There's probably a lot more damage than would be very likely, but I think it helps to create a bit of an impression of how shoddy was the construction of these early T-26 variants. Apparently the armour plates were often so poorly fitted that the crew could see light leaking in around them, and bullet fragments finding their way in through the seams was a real danger.

This model is the first one that has presented me with the issue of uncured resin inside pooling and melting away at the shell — I clearly didn't wash out the turret as well as I had thought, and the turret peg was starting to come away from the body. I pulled it right off and hit the innards with a UV torch, and then superglued it back in place; that should take care of the problem this time.

I've now made a little snake-neck UV LED curing wand that is small enough to poke into a 4mm hole, so hopefully this will be adequate to ameliorating the issue in future.

The information I have from the internet suggests that a minute or two with this should cure the resin  left on the inside surfaces sufficiently. I don't know how long a 9v battery will last, running one of these LEDs. They're fairly expensive, compared with AA batteries, so if the lifetime is too short I may be better off spending a bit more on a 9v power supply and switch.

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I've decided to try a new (to me) experimental method of painting the tracks. It's pretty straightforward.

1)   I painted the entire track run in a mid grey, in this case, VMC Medium Sea Grey. I think pretty much any grey would do, though if it's too dark you'd lose a bit of the colour variation the next step gives.

2)   Next, I gave it a couple of coats of fairly thin Vallejo Game Effects Dry Rust. I like the grainy texture this stuff leaves.

3)   Last, I gave the tracks a dry-brush of VMC Oily Steel. This catches the light and pops out the highlights a bit, while being quite neutral in tone so the brown of the Dry Rust still predominates.

It's not too different from my usual track-painting method, which is to start with a medium brown, splosh on a couple of washes, and dry-brush. I don't know that there's much to choose between them, though I do prefer the texture of the Dry Rust.

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The next step is oil-washing. The wash in this case is just raw umber oil paint in white spirit — turpentine can be used, but I find white spirit evaporates faster, and is less likely to leave any oily residue. 

I prefer using an oil-based wash to an acrylic one, as I find it wicks along creases better, and it's more manageable — excess colour can be taken back off just with a clean brush, slightly moistened with white spirit. However, if I'm in a hurry I'll still use Citadel and/or Vallejo acrylic washes, as they dry quickly and I can race ahead to the next stage. A white spirit wash needs to sit for half an hour or an hour before proceeding, and leaving it to dry overnight is better, especially if you intend to do any more spirit-based pin-washes.

The white spirit evaporates long before the oil paint is dry, and  when the spirit is almost all gone, I can come back in with a brush and do a bit of streaking of the still-soft paint — you can see it very clearly on the glacis.

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Paint chipping is my next stage. This is, no doubt, a familiar process to most AFV modellers these days. It's a weathering step that comes and goes in fashion; for a while it seemed like every AFV model represented a machine that had been forty years in the field without access to a paint shop, but people are being a bit more restrained nowadays.

I use a bit of torn foam to apply the "chips" in a semi-random fashion, and I like to glue the bit of foam to the end of a matchstick, to keep my sausage-fingers out of the way. You can do it in a much more controlled way by using a small pointed paintbrush, but that takes a long time and I'm generally too impatient.

My favourite colour for this is Vallejo Panzer Aces Dark Rust, but any dark brown will do. I've seen dark grey used as well, but I prefer brown to represent oxidized metal.

The key here is not to mash the paint-loaded foam hard against the model, or else you end up with big blotches of paint instead of small, discrete patches of chips.

The main focus is on the corners of the model, and areas of high wear, such as where the crew climb in and out of the machine.

After the chips have been applied, I take another step and add highlights to the edges of the chip patches with a light colour. This can be a tint of the vehicle's base paint colour, or a neutral light grey, or in this case I've used VMC German Camo Beige, which is the same colour I used for the initial dry-brushing to bring out the model's surface detail. This gives the chips a bit of three-dimensionality.

You don't have to hit every single speck and chip, but it's a good idea to get all the large areas, and it's best to confine the effect mostly to the lower edges of the chip area, where the broken paint edge would catch the light. I use a lot of thinner in my paint, and a very small pointed brush, but even so, in this small scale I find it very difficult to get an effect that is both subtle and visible.

You can also do this with a sponge, to get chips that have scratched the surface of the paint, but not penetrated right through to the bare metal. I've skipped that on this model.

Something else I haven't done on this model, but which can look good: go in on large areas of high-traffic chipping with a sharp HB pencil, and scribble into the brown-painted areas only. This will give them a metallic sheen, looking more like areas that are being constantly abraded. You don't need (or want) to entirely cover the brown with graphite; you just need enough there to give it a metallic glint.

As with any weathering technique, it's easy to go overboard with this.

Easy Wood Grain

These are bits from a very old 1/24 scale SPAD XIII that I started detailing, and never got around to finishing.

The plywood shelf below the cockpit coaming is the focus here: it's just a flat piece of plastic card with wood grain painted on.

I base coated it in a sandy tan to begin with, and then laid on some oil paint, thinned with linseed oil. I think, from memory, it was burnt umber, or maybe VanDyck brown.

When I had a reasonably complete, but thin, layer of oil paint, I created the grain by dragging across it with an old ragged stiff brush. You want to do this in one pass if you can; if you go back over an area that has already been done, it will probably just mess it up and you'll have to start again.

You can achieve a similar effect with acrylics, mixed with enough medium to make it translucent, but I found that it tends to dry too fast. It might be more successful if used with a retarder, but I haven't tried.

Oiling Up

This is a 3d-printed 1:100 scale T-70, printed on my Ender 3 from a (slightly changed) model by M. Bergman.

It's the first time I've tried using oil paints for pin-washes and streaking, and I think I like the process. The extended working and cleanup time is a boon, and the solvent (white spirit) wicks quickly and easily along creases and crevices.

The base colour is Vallejo's ModelAir Soviet 4B0 sprayed over black and white pre-shading.

I've only used one oil colour on this — raw umber. I've seen other modellers using spots of several colours for surface streaking, but that tends to be in larger scales (1/48 or 1/35), and this model is very tiny. I think a multi-toned streaking effect would get overdone very, very quickly.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with it so far. It could, no doubt, be done better, but that will come with experience. Now, on with all the detail painting.

And all done.

For someone with no intention of building a Soviet wargames army, I sure do have a lot of Soviet kit.

Paint Rage! Aaaaaaaaagh!

This is something that really gets on my tits. A named colour in two paint ranges by the same manufacturer with entirely different hues.

I'd like to think that I could spray a model in VMA Middlestone, and then if need be, touch it up with VMC Middlestone, and I don't think that's too high a bar to set. This is just shoddy laziness.

Inconsistency

As I've mentioned before, I really do not enjoy production-line painting, so I tend to paint models, and often figures too, one at a time.

However, a significant problem with that is that I'm terrible at maintaining consistency in my painting from session to session. These are three 1:100 (15mm) A10 Cruiser Mk.II, each painted at a different time, and each one completely different in appearance to either of the others.

The one on the left is from PSC, the other two are 3d printed.

Figure Holders for Painting

I've tried all sorts of methods of holding figures for painting, from the simplest (bottle caps and blutak) to the fancy (3d-printed handle and adjustable gripping socket), and they all work well enough. However, at each end of the scale they have their issues: the bottle caps are small, don't offer much gripping surface, and are easily knocked over, while the fancy 3d-printed handle is quite bulky, and takes a very, very long time to print, which is fine if you just want one or two, but I'd want at least a dozen.

I've finally settled on this system: short lengths of 25mm beech dowel (bits of a broomstick, in fact) with a nail driven into an end, and a steel washer epoxied around the nail head. I can whip these up very quickly.

The individual stands are reasonably stable, and if need be, more weight can be added by gluing lead or steel slugs to the bottom. The 16mm washers on top are broad enough to support a decent blob of blutak, for attaching figures with non-ferrous bases, but more often I mount my figures on steel washers, so I just put a 10x1mm magnet on the holder and attach the figure to that.

When I'm painting a group of figures, the individual stands tend to just cluster about on my painting table, but the wooden tray for them is useful to keep everything organised if need be.