Pinselwut, miniature painting by Solmar

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!

Today i want to show you how you get really smooth blendings on mid-to-large areas such as armor, cloaks, horses and so on. As always in miniature painting, i did not invented this technique, just fund it really useful for myself and wanted to share it with you.

So let´s start with a graphical image, showing you the painting steps. I use this process with glazing technique (buildung up a gradient with many thinned down layers). But it should also work with wet-blending and layering as well.

click on the image to zoom.

Step 1: Paint the surface with your basecolor. Easy step, no magic here.



Step 2: Build up your highlights. Also, nothing special here. Just paint your highlights as you always do.



Step 3: Now here comes the important part! Blend the colors back from your highlights to your basecolor. Wait, why am i doing this? I do it because maybe i made some mistakes in the gradient or it is chalky or it is just not smooth. By blending back, i am smoothing the transitions between the colors. I am using more diluted paint than in the second step.


 The main reason on blending the whole gradient again but reverse is caused by the simple fact, that it is easier to blend a dark color on an existing lighter color than vice versa. ;)


Step 4: Build up your shadows as usual.



Step 5: Repeating the magic. Again you blend back this gradient to your basecolor. But here you have to be careful, using more diluted than in step 4.



Step 6: Now, when your blending is smooth, you can "unify" the colors with a really really diluted layer of basecolor (more colored wather than thinned paint). After that you can place the final highlights.



And with this process, making blendings on large surfaces smoother is a bit easier now. :)

I hope you found this Tutorial useful, even when it was´nt a practical one.