Depending on what you paint, use a white, a gray or a black. Priming lots of buildings really eats through your spray paint. You can get a good spray paint for about a third of the price. Good for miniatures though.ĭon’t use Army painter or Citadel spray paint for terrain. I have tried using an airbrush but it takes to long. I use rattle cans to base coat my printed terrain.
If you have some experience on the matter, feel free to share them in the comments! If you have some questions, in the comments and I will try my best to answer them. This is the first part, dealing with equipment. I will give you some tips from my own experience. Now that you have printed some nice terrain, you want to paint it. I will work more with this but it could be ready for the tabletop. See how the model has lots of definition already. Then I brush all over the model until I am happy. When I start to pick out brush streaks on the newspaper, the brush is ready. Then started working it into the bristles. Also I selected a brush that was good size for the details. I want it to be different shades of gray in the end. Here I have a base coated (black spray) wreckage. One advantage is that paint from overbrushing dries much faster. You will probably need at least three coats to get a covering equaling that of normal painting. Together with a dark (probably black) base coat, you will get a very nice effect with very little effort. Instead, by working a small amount of paint into the bristles and pressing the brush quite hard against the surface of the model, the paint sticks mostly to flat surfaces, edges, corners and other protruding parts. The brush should not be loaded with much paint so it floods every detail. Overbrushing is a technique to enhance the details of a model. See the difference between the first (above) and second (below): The paint can easily rest in the palette without drying out.Īs you can see in the pictures below the first layer isn’t covering the white 100%. When you have painted the entire piece, let it dry for an hour. Details can be painted with other colors later. I usually paint over everything with this color. It tends to be quite thick so I thin it down just a little with water. But it will cost more.įor this I use a big brush and house paint (emulsion or latex paint). You can of course do this with a rattle can too. If you want to make it very easy, paint it in the color you want the finished piece to be. It is time to pick up the brush and give the piece a basic color. It will give your piece some variation and a more natural look. Also, since you probably will drench it in other kinds of paint later, don’t worry if the base coat is a little thin some places. So don’t worry if you drench the print in paint. But with prints, you probably want to hide them. When spray priming your miniatures, it is important to not get a thick layer of paint. You can rotate it to paint from different angles. It’s good to have the print on a cardboard box. Press down and use gentle strokes back and forth over the print to paint it. Hold the nozzle about 20cm (5 inch) from the piece. Be outside, or a very well ventilated area. If I want a piece with lighter colors I will use white. I may be interested in the base coat shining through. So I always give my terrain a base coat, black or white, depending on how I intend to continue painting. I almost always paint with gray filament, since that is easiest to snap pictures of to show you guys and gals. Start with giving your print a base coat. Let’s be honest here, terrain printed on a FDM printer is good for gaming, but not dioramas.
I will through this series focus on techniques that makes painting simple and quick. I’m no expert painter and when I paint terrain I am quite impatient and don’t think about the details much. You print terrain on your home 3D printer and want it to look ok on the game board. This painting series is for people with limited or no painting skills.