HOW CAN I: Paint the basic coats of lizardmen with an airbrush?

Hello fellas,

on this post I'll start the section: "HOW CAN I...?"

This post is about HOW CAN I Paint the basic coats of lizardmen with an airbrush??

Basically I'll paint it in three steps:
· White priming
· Paint the darker colour
· Paint the clear colour

I pretend to paint the two basic layers of a lizardmen, and basically they have two colors.

Why do I paint in this order? because in small models (I'm used to ogre models) we can not mask the areas that we don't want to paint, probably we'll mess the area that we don't want paint and it's easier to darken than clear.

I allways paint in pieces, it's easier to reach all places of the miniature in this way.

1.- White priming

2.- Dark colour coat:  In this case dark blue from Vallejo, this will be the color of the scales, the base color, over this coat I'll put layers in every scale to highlight.

3.- Paint the skin with the clear base as we want, we have to paint directly with the clear colour and where we want we have to do more emphasis with airbrush to reach the clearness that we are looking for, they will be our firsts highlights. Basically we'll paint until have a clear area over the chest and near the scales. We'll not concentrate a lot of paint in the areae near the scales because we are trying to reach a degraded.

Those skinks are well and easy painted because the paint used on they are airbrush paint, it has the texture and the appropriate viscosity for an airbrush, with this kind of paint we can control the flux of paint than we throw over the miniature.

I've painted it and I paint all my miniatures using a presure of 15/20 PSI, no more than that! if we put more presure the paint will go out will a lot of force and we'll mess it up, and less pressure implies that the airbrush will spit the paint and we'll mess it up too.

Now I'm going to show you what I'm painting right now. The preparation of the models and all the process of the airbrush base coating.

1.- Model preparation, all of them separated in pieces, I have 4 types of pieces, the bodies, the right arms (weapon arm), the left arms (shield arm) and the heads.

2.- I've painted the white primer and the first coat of dark blue over the models.

3.- In this case I have a problem and I ask myself the following question: "May I use Citadel base paint on my airbrush?"... well the answer is... yes you can but is better not do that. The Citadel base paint is like a foundation and it's very thick and it may obstruct airbrush.

I wanted to paint the skin of the temple guard with Citadel temple guard blue and it implies to use this class of paint in my airbrush... so, how can I paint it without breaking the airbrush? Easy, I have to thin the paint, I've used Vallejo thinner, you have to mix the thinner and the paint until you have a mixture like milk, then, only then you can use it on the airbrush and paint the models.

Due to the paint is more fluid than origin Citadel paint, we cannot bring closer the airbrush to the model and paint, because we'll mess all the work done, we have to paint  at a prudential distance messing the previous work with the dark colour, you can see what am I saying on this picture.

As you can see, I crosed the dark line of the tail, but it has an easy solution, we have to go over the errors with a brush and correct the scales using the dark color.

This is the result, I like it very much, is a perfect base to paint an excellent unit like the temple guard, I have the two basic colors of the unit and I saved a lot of time applying them, we can assert that I spent 5 hours, preparing the models, priming them and applying with this two colors on the heads, arms and bodies.

36 Bodies + 36 Right arms + 26 Left Arms + 26 Heads = 124 pieces primed and two base colored.

Time spent on every piece: 300 minutes / 124 pieces = 2' 25" average for each piece, taking account that you spent more time in a body than an arm or a head.

Is it worth? Yes, I have no doubt about it, the result is more clean than a current brush.

Thank you very much! and I hope you like this HOW CAN I...?

See you on the next post, with skink priest pictures.