Hi guys!

Well I said I would after the interest generated in this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=22&t=11070

Now I have started on this project of detailing the techniques and methods to painting these models. The first tutorial is available to download now in PDF format here:
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?v01zh3rvf12

This is a first draft and at this stage is sans pictures, which I will be adding just as soon as I manage to take some decent ones!

Anyway, let me know what you think, tell me if you found anything ambiguous of if things need expanding on. I plan on adding more of these here to eventually get a full set of "how to's" for painting Thousand sons like I do. I am keeping it topical simply to keep it easy to understand. All of these techniques are inter usable with any other models you might like, so I hope it is useful to some.


Eagerly awaiting feedback,


Sam.

Great tutorial

Just add those pictures and this part is as good as the best I've seen.

I really appreciate you explaining the wet blending technique in such a simple and step-by-step way. I've never dared to try it since it felt so complex and time consuming. I'm very tempted to try and learn it. Could you exchange the water with a glaze to get more time to blend or do you need more advanced stuff?

I think this word is supposed to be "very" in Stage 5:
"This is just to make the viewer notice those
parts of the model more and is vert subtle."

Otherwise it's flawless!

Thank you for taking time to write such a quality tutorial and I look forward to the next chapters

Cheers /Sturm

Thanks Sturm, glad you liked it, good reply too, I have fixed the word "very" in my master.

You could theoretically exchange the water for a glaze, just bear in mind that you still want the paint to be thin, so the glad/paint mixture may still need watering down if its a thicker glaze medium.

You also want to keep the surface matt, so only a matt glaze would be usable really. If it is not matt, your subsequent layers will bead off too easily and be a major paint to make behave!

I am glad to see you are trying the technique due to my tute. This is the sort of response that makes the time and effort put into these things entirely worth while! I too was in your boat for a while until I saw someone using the technique and figured it didn't look that hard. Hearing about it makes it sound very complex when in fact it is very simple, just hard to do, if that makes sense?
Essentially it is a great technique that saves time but need practice and lots of it to work.

I will try and take some decent pics tonight some time and update it over the next few days.

If you are going to try this out I'd recommend using a strip of flat plasticard or something similar to try it on first, not your models...


Good luck and thanks for your response!

Nicely done Shadowwalker,

The PDF was very quick and easy to download and you described how the painting should be done very well. Each explanation was very clear and concise and it definatley shows you put a lot of thought into it. The only thing I might suggest is maybe a couple How-to photos included in the PDF, but that is really just my two cents.

Great job,

-SS

Thanks SS

Read first post:


So to answer your post, yeah I always wanted to add photos, just none of the ones I have taken thus far are good enough!

Excellent work! This topic will eventually be moved to the Painting sub-forum, but for now, I'm going to leave it in place so that some of our 'Saal ranked members can post and ask questions.

Looking forward to further updates.

Thanks for this tutorial Shadowwalker.
I was getting some issues with the tide marks before, but your guide explains just how to fix this.

Your Thousand Sons look amazing, i really like the light-brown and blue combination, and look forward to seeing more pics of your miniatures

Glad you like my work sen, even more glad that the tutorial has helped you!

With this technique I think the single biggest fail point for new people trying it is simply that they are trying to do too much at one time. You have to work with the paint while wet, letting it dry even slightly will give you sub par results that are difficult to fix, so working on smaller areas at once is a much easier way to do it!

This is true of any "paint pushing" technique.

As for pics of the sons, more will come, as I work on them!

Printing Page 1... Printing Page 2!
This will help, making my eldar look better than just black primered !
Thanks for your Tutorial this is really cool stuff.
You should get 2$ for each Download, and me as your manager you should give 10%

Haha how entrepreneurial of you!

Seriously though, I learnt this stuff the hard way mostly, and I like the fact I can teach people the tips behind advanced techniques for free! I get that warm fuzzy feeling and that is enough for me

Having said that, as I expand this into more and more techniques and write ups, I might one day do a video demo or printed guide that could be chargeable one day...


Soon I will add the images promised, just haven't had allot of time lately... (I should get stuff ready for it tonight given some time...)

So to answer your post, yeah I always wanted to add photos, just none of the ones I have taken thus far are good enough![/quote]

Sorry, I got caught up in all of the tutorial goodness and lost track of what I read! Great work again and I am glad to see so many folks giving you great feedback on this. I f you are using a digital camera, the macro option might help you when taking photos of minis. I also know it can be hard to focus on painting something just right and taking photos of it at the same time. Best of luck!

That is the hardest thing. There are 3-4 stages of painting this technique where you have literally only a few seconds to work with the colour. Try working with it while taking pics quickly and you end up with some nice fuzzy pics!

I will be using some plain plasticard for the examples, that way I can paint a larger surface and theoretically have more time to take pictures. Painting a mini that will eventually go into my army, I am hesitant to stop to get images for a tutorial as it will likely impair the overall quality of the model. Also the smaller surface areas are harder to take good photos with when I only have a small digicam that was designed for taking happy snaps of people and landscapes (I find a 10x zoom helps little with model photography). Also if there is a macro setting on that camera, I haven't found it! (really need to look through the manual)


Anyway, should be able to get onto this over the weekend (sorry for the delay)... At least with the cold mornings ATM and no heater wood left, paint dry times have increased dramatically!


I would also like to encourage anyone giving this tutorial a go to contact me if you have any problems, if you supply images of the *botched* work I can give tips as I should be able to see what went wrong. (when you have painted as many marines like this as I now have, you can tell the problem by looking at the result)

I have followed your Thousand Sons blog carefully! With my silver/red Tau scheme I cannot use this technique, so I'm gonna practice on sprues, spare weapons etc. so that come my second army I can use wet blending to my heart's desire!
Sorry for the rant
Hopefully I'll go for a Tyranid/Daemons army and shall use wet blending on the claws and skin.

Cheers and good luck,
Lightning
PS. Can't wait for your second installment!

Thanks for the post Lightning, and wow, someone stickied this!

Wet blending isn't a technique that "just works" and while I try my best to explain it here until I edit this with images it may be difficult to understand fully. There are a number of things that if not done just right will ruin an attempt at wet blending.

The best advice I can give it to keep trying it, practice and practice until you can pull it off every time!


Now that the Golden Demon painting rush is over I should hopefully be able to flesh this out a little more now. The Thousand Sons are calling me to continue their cause, so I should have plenty of models crying out for photoshoots.

I might try and borrow a video camera too, this technique really is easier to SEE it working than describing the process with words...

very nice indeed. great stuff. real GD material. but you already knew that hey.

got some pics of mine. not that impressve, but a nice try I think. am painting a tzeentch army for a friens (payed commission work).

http://s126.photobucket.com/albums/p86/ ... usand1.jpg

hope you like them.

will post my cadre some time too (they were on this forum a while back in time, but I'll take some better pics)

greetz