Things I Wish I'd Known! - Miniature Painting Tips

in this video the top 10 mistakes i made as a new miniature painter hi everybody my name is nate and you are watching wasd 20 a channel about tabletop rpgs and fantasy maps this video is sponsored by loot studios who has an excellent subscription service for 3d printable miniatures and terrain and the miniature i'll be painting today is from their march set i'll talk more about them later but for now you can find a link down in the video description and now on to my biggest miniature painting regrets [Music] so the first major regret i have in my early miniature painting days was related to brush care not getting my brushes clean enough and just not taking proper care of them i did buy some pretty expensive sable kalinsky brushes and then i proceeded to wreck them pretty good by just not getting them clean enough so definitely i would recommend getting a brush cleaner if you're getting some expensive brushes this is the most common stuff the masters brush cleaner and preserver you can pick this up on amazon i'll put a link down in the video description to all the stuff i'm mentioning in this video but it is highly recommended to get something to wash out the brushes better than just kind of swishing them around in your dirty water and then saying good to go now another major mistake i've seen a lot of people make is leaving the brushes down in their cup of water just like this big mistake that is going to ruin the bristles first off it's sitting in that mucky water secondly it's going to get that nice shape totally ruined because they're just kind of pressing down also when you are done cleaning your brush i see a lot of people just putting them up like this and that is a good way to get that slightly painty water that might still be in there all down in here and slowly building up over time and ruining your brush so definitely find some way to hang it you can get even a rubber band and like put that around something personally i love my little piece of pipe insulation that i cut some slits in and i can just put my brushes up like that at least until they dry it's really important to not store them like this secondly another mistake that i made is using brushes that were just too small for the job for some reason and i see this with a lot of new painters i see people using these tiny little brushes this one right here is a size double zero and people tend to think that if i'm not using some tiny little brush that i'm gonna be messing things up and i'm getting paint where it doesn't belong and things like that and that is absolutely not the case these brushes are only for super super detail like i only really use them on eyeballs or maybe like a tiny little gem or something like that in general i am using my size two sable kalinsky brush from red grass games or for base coating and a lot of other jobs i'm using this big old brush so on the treant that you see me painting in this video i did a lot of my painting with this thing because it's a bigger miniature i'm not worried so much about detail i've got a lot of space to play with so you see me using a variety of pretty big brushes especially when you get to dry brushing don't use your good brushes so anyway all that to say paint with bigger brushes in general you can still get a lot of control especially if it's a stable kalinski brush it's still going to come to a nice fine point and you can hold a lot more paint in there which means it'll stay wet less work for you going back to the palette and when you're using this tiny little brush it's going to get dried out really quickly which is going to ruin the brush faster now before the next mistake i got a comment on this amazing tree ant mini i'm painting in this video i 3d printed this thing myself and all this other awesome stuff after i got the loot studios march subscription the oasis it's definitely got a feywild sort of vibe here and they look so good now these are all pre-supported 3d printable files and all of this is only 15 along with their amazing welcome pack for new subscribers this price is only good until the end of march so don't miss out there's a link in the description and if you use that one it will let them know i sent you thanks so much to lute for sponsoring this video and for providing this incredible mini [Music] another really common mistake and i won't go into too much detail on this one and i made the mistake as well is paints that are too thick just getting that feel for how thin your paints need to be can take some time but generally i've heard people describe it as you want about the thickness of like whole milk or maybe two percent milk or something like that you want it pretty thin and you're going to be applying many thin layers of paint rather than just one coat of thick paint when you use thick paint it mucks up the details it just looks chunky and gross don't do it thin your paints in almost all cases i would say that about probably 80 to 90 percent of my bottles of paint when i'm putting that out on my pallet yep it's too thick i gotta add just a little bit of water to thin it out now that leads me to my next point and that is that hey you can erase your paint now you will know your paint is too thin when you put it on the miniature and all of a sudden it just starts going everywhere it just starts flowing everywhere all over the miniature in places where you don't want it because the paint is so watery and here is how you can fix those mistakes just grab a little bit of a paper towel and dab it right in there and get that capillary action sucking the paint up into the paper towel and it will take care of that big old messy situation no problem now there are a couple other ways you can also erase your paint and again this is a mistake i made a lot as i would just make a mistake and then i think oh now i got to let it dry so i can paint over it and fix it later no you can use your thumb to rub paint off your finger you can lick it a little bit sometimes if you need to or you can even get just a wet brush and just kind of get that brush over the spot you want to remove until it's gone and sometimes that works so try these things you are not powerless when you make a mistake or a happy little accident as bob ross would call it take control and understand you have options another mistake i made when i was new was not painting with any kind of holder just kind of holding on to the miniature now that's something that a lot of new painters do but i would say find something something is better than nothing for a long time i used this wine cork with just a little bit of poster putty on it or a paint lid or a pill bottle pill bottles work great nowadays i do use these more official paint holders from red grass games they're really nice they have some benefits for sure but anything is better than nothing the reason being you're just going to have so much more control and ability to turn that miniature at various angles not get paint all over your fingers not accidentally smudge the wet paint with your fingers get some poster putty and something to put your miniature on and you'll find it's a lot easier to paint now that leads me to my next mistake that i often made is just tolerating a bad angle for my miniature i vividly remember actually just setting my miniature on the table and painting it like this kind of hunched over obviously because i'm a little bit tall and just really struggling and finding that this is not working you want to put pick up that thing on a handle and get whatever angle works best for you if you have a hard to reach area just keep on turning the miniature and get that thing moving around until you can find whatever angle works best twist and turn that thing now another mistake kind of related to this is when you're doing this and you're just kind of painting your miniature sitting there on the table or even on your miniature holder often you're gonna find that you don't have great control and it's a really good idea to steady your painting hand on something often i just study it on my other hand just putting my wrist right on my other hand as i'm painting or on the pill bottle or whatever you're using can really help steady your hands if you have shaky hands at all there are lots of options for you to study that thing another helpful thing is maybe just to put your elbow on the table as you're doing this or wherever you're painting the table or the desk and that can help too [Music] now a huge mistake i made when i first started was just being a perfectionist i had watched lots of youtube videos on how to paint miniatures and i had very high standards and i spent something like five or six hours on a single miniature a couple times and i'm not talking about some big elaborate miniature i'm talking about you know like this elf right here which yeah i probably spent about six hours on if i recall if you enjoy spending that much time on a single miniature great more power to you but for a lot of us i think it's a good idea to just kind of keep things moving and understand that you're gonna get better over time don't be such a perfectionist don't get discouraged and down on yourself progress over perfection [Music] and on that note miniature selection matters too a common mistake i made was buying miniatures that had they looked really really cool don't get me wrong but they had so much detail and i had big dreams of how i was going to paint these things and it just never panned out really what i should have done is sure you can buy those miniatures with lots of little buckles and pouches and bobbles and blades and all this stuff but also buy like a werewolf or just a wolf or an owl bear or even a troll or something like that is usually going to be a lot easier to paint or a lot of these miniatures from this loot set for example which are very forgiving because a lot of them are made of wood and natural materials and you can just kind of splotch paint on and you know get a little bit creative with it and go outside the lines so to speak but yeah any kind of wild animal is just gonna be so much easier to paint than one of these little player character models that have all these buckles and all this stuff now more power to you get some of those two and try them out but if you're having trouble and getting discouraged understand it might be your miniature selection are you picking miniatures that have tons and tons of detail and are just a little bit too challenging for you at this point and the last mistake i made with my miniatures is not properly finishing them in a couple ways first off basing put a base on your miniatures especially when you're getting these reaper ones that don't come with bases it just looks so much better once you get a base on that thing and find a standard sort of base that you're going to be using for all your miniatures at first my style was fender washers i just got a whole bunch of these cheapo fender washers and they actually worked pretty well and i would just put a little bit of glue and sand on top and that really worked but yeah when you put a base on your miniature and just a little bit of sand or a little bit of grass or something it just tells the viewer that man this thing is finished and i am proud of this thing sending an unbased miniature out there onto instagram or twitter is like sending your child out on a winter day with no coat don't do that and lastly the other thing that i was not doing at all in the beginning was putting an actual clear coat finish on my miniatures which really helps protect them so i have lots of miniatures from the early days that got chipped or smudged just kind of wore off over the time with finger grime because i didn't put a clear coat on so get a nice clear coat i'll put a couple links to those down in the video description and that will help you protect your miniatures and make sure that they can stay pretty for years to come all right that's going to do it for this one everybody thank you so much for joining me i would love to hear your feedback down in the comments below what are some of the biggest mistakes you made as a new painter or what are some of those mistakes you often see other new painters making all right before we go thank you so much to the wasd 20 patrons patrons are people who support the channel on a monthly basis they're a huge part of why i can do what i do here in addition to helping out the channel they also get access to some pretty cool rewards things like weekly live map drawing streams with me other exclusive behind the scenes stuff including campaign diaries for my ongoing icewinddale d d campaign so anyway check it all out over at patreon.com wasd20 all right thanks so much everybody take care you'll see me again very soon [Music] you

Channel: WASD20

Views: 7,575

Rating: 4.9706421 out of 5

Keywords: d&d, dungeons and dragons, miniature painting, mini painting, mini painting tips, wasd20, loot studio, the oasis, noob mistakes, painting miniatures, 3d printed miniatures, dnd, rpg, tabletop rpg, tabletop gaming, minis, miniatures, vallejo, wet pallette, red grass games, miniature painting mistakes, common mistakes, best tips, dungeon master, dm tips, gm tips, game master, warhammer, how to paint minis, how to paint dnd miniatures, d&d miniatures

Id: M6b88ZA07VU

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021