For all of you who have been patiently waiting for something besides what some may think of as a bunch of no-brainers, this installment should begin to hit on some ideas in miniature painting that aren't as widely known.

I want to explain dry brushing and washes this time, and while many of you may already know about these techniques, I have encountered a lot of people who have never seen this before. For those that have some experience, perhaps you can learn something from this section because I intend to actually go beyond the simple explanations of the techniques alone and into some of its application in ways that I do not see as often.

As an example, did you know you can blend colors with dry brushing? How about going with a semi-wet dry brushing technique? We will also be expounding on using washes with paint or ink, and in combination with dry brushing to create different effects. In essence, some of the cheap tricks of painting are going to be talked about this time.

Basic Dry Brushing

First, you do have a proper dry brush, don't you? If you're not quite sure what this kind of brush is, ask the person at the counter. Its going to be a stiffer brush with a blunt or flat end. You can get them in various sizes, and they are not intended to be used to make any thin lines or anything of that sort. Be wary, though, because dry brushing is also used in portrait painting and the brushes for that are a bit different. You can probably use those brushes for a miniature, but they're usually pretty large and thus not really useful for detail work. Yes, I realize I just said that they aren't intended for detail work, but a small dry brush can actually do some pretty detailed stuff.

The idea behind dry brushing is simple. We'll start with the basic method, which is to put color onto raised areas of a model to highlight. A classic example would be painting chainmail, which we'll follow here to make it easier to imagine.

Starting with a black base coat on the chainmail, we select a color for it such as a grey. You get some grey on your dry brush and then wipe most of the paint off with a paper towel. In fact, just go ahead and try to wipe all of it off so that all you have left is a kind of residue on the brush. Lightly sweep the brush across the chainmail's surface, and presto, all the links get paint on them while all the recesses stay their original color.

Let me stress sweeping across, and not pushing into the miniature, and lightly. You only want the hairs on the brush to be in contact with the raised areas of the miniature to place color on those sections. Now you have depth. Repeat until its a good consistency. Add a little white to the grey to lighten it up, and then dry brush it again, but only very lightly and in the more raised sections. The grey establishes the color of the chain links, the lighter shade creates highlights to show the highest portions and a light effect to the figure. That, in effect, is drybrushing at its most common level.

The paint for drybrushing can be thin or thick, but unlike in your preparations for the base coat, keep the paint a little bit thicker than that. Do not get your dry brush wet when you're going to do this. Just dip it into the paint, wipe most of it off, and get to brushing it. You can use this on the entire model, really, to do flesh or just to highlight the figure.

Try this on all the sections of your miniature using a brighter color than the base coat. The more contrasting the shade, the easier it will show. Experiment with the pressure you place on the brush from heavy to very light, this will effect how it goes on. It is best to wipe as much paint off the brush as possible at this point. Its better to have to place several layers of drybrushing on something than to have clumps on it. This is going to be a very recurring theme. Layering is something very key to painting in general.

Now, with that basic technique established, I recommend you play with a little before moving on into anything else. Like in all thing, practice is the key to good technique. Of course, we're not talking about painting 50 miniatures for a unit of riflemen for a tabletop game, so let's go ahead and get into some of the intricacies of drybrushing.

So far, we've learned how to raise the color on raised portions of the model. This will bring out chainmail, as the example above, or fur, or even the details of the face, hands, guns, armor, and so on. It does this because the paint doesn't come off as easily and is only really pulled off by the pressure or the raised surfaces it brushes against. In the example above, its mostly about the raised surfaces, but lets go further into the pressure that I asked you experiment with.

Paint is sitting there on the brush, and it is dryer than what you normally do. It is not, however, actually dry... despite the name. It will come off the brush and flow a bit, though minutely. It's the same if you're painting normally and as the brush runs out of paint, less comes off the brush as it's adhered to the hairs of the brush and not much of it is in contact with the model. Only the tiniest bits still clinging to the brush could come off, which is why you get more paint because it will not come off evenly.

In drybrushing, that's part of the intent. You don't want it to come off easily, forcing some effort to force the pigment from the brush. The harder you push with it, the more paint will come off. The lighter you press the brush, the less that will come off.

So, what's the point? Well, you can also use drybrushing to create color transitions or fades. Let us use another example to best explain what is being done. Let's use a simple example like horse legs.

I'm no equestrian, but we've all seen horses in movies or television. Something nice to complete the look of a horse's legs is to have the lighter hair towards the hooves that makes it look like they're wearing socks. Using your dry brush, starting from the bottom, you dry brush the color thickly with heavy pressure. This will cover most everything.

As you move up the leg slowly, you lessen the pressure and stroke more slowly to control the amount of pigment and decrease pressure and frequency as you go up the leg. You will put less pigment on the model the lighter you press and have more control of how much you put on by slowing your strokes. The color will fade into the horse's regular color and you will have made "socks" for the horse.

Similarly, if you were to paint something like a piece of armor on a thigh or a large shoulder piece, assuming a somewhat smooth surface, you can fade in a similar fashion. Depending on its size, it may take a bit more work, but the same principle applies. For example you could have a red armor piece that fades into orange and then yellow towards the edges and perhaps even dry brush on a nearly white area at actual edge of the piece to simulate light being caught by the edge.

This will take a little practice with volume of paint on the brush, pressure, and just running the brush across the surface with consistent pressure. Again, just keep layering the paint on until its the consistency that you want.

Making light effects or even painting metal without metallic paints can be accomplished this way. Using a smaller dry brush, you simply direct the highlighting and changes in color to more accurately show light effects. The best way to determine how to do a light effect is to look at a picture or have something in front of you. At the very least, look at a color piece of art by someone who knows how it works and just copy the light effects.

The biggest benefit of drybrushing is that it puts so much less pigment on, you just gradually layer everything on how you want it. Using the least amount of paint and the lightest of touches puts the paint on most softly, heavier paint and/or heavier pressure will create more smudgy or smeared appearances. At its softest, it will be like putting particles of dust evenly distributed across the surface. Be sure to get more paint and wipe it off on the paper towel as much as you need to.

Another nice property of drybrushing, especially in color changes or shifts in highlight shading are easily done by just mixing the paint with the dry brush and wiping it dry as you go. As the successive layers get lighter, the transitions will be easier to see and the subtlety of the color changes can be maximized.

This is a form of blending, something considered a higher level skill, using a simple method. This is probably one of the easiest ways of doing it. The only downside to this kind of painting is the lack of total precision and the dramatically increased amount of paint is uses. There are a lot of professional painters fooling you every day by using these methods, quickly knocking out what appears to be extremely detailed work on the proper types of miniatures when all it really consists of is a lot of skillful drybrushing. This doesn't mean their work isn't worth it, it just means it isn't as intricate as you might think.

I've won competitions with a miniature that was 90% drybrushed. Using successive layers, controlled brushing with a smaller dry brush, and creative use of color shifts, I got the piece done in 4 hours after the dragon was assembled.

Another trick of drybrushing has nothing to do with technique but all to do with making a miniature cool: cast light. This is a way for a miniature holding something that emits light to have that light reflect on the character.

Let's say you're doing a character with a light saber. In this case, let's go ahead and make it blue. He's holding it close to his face, wouldn't some of the light and the blue show there or in other places? There are some talented people out there who can paint these light effects straight on. We, being amateurs, might have a harder time of it. However, with a few light wisps of the brush and the right color choice (brighter is better), we can use drybrushing to get a simpler effect. With the blue lightsaber, just take some light blue and dry brush it lightly onto the closer places to the light saber. That's it. To embellish it, mix in some white and touch it onto those areas more finely and perhaps in a vague line in the shape of the saber.

Now, from the places you light drybrushed the original blue, add a tiny bit of a darker blue to the original light blue. Just a tad, mind, you want the minutest of changes in color, and dry brush even lighter outside of the area you drybrushed light blue. Just around it in a slight fringe so as to appear to have less of the light. Depending on how bright you want the lightsaber to be against the face or whatever, you can make the areas of color larger. This method isn't as fancy or as neat looking as the custom painted on jobs, but its a lot easier.

When its Fun to be Washing...

We'll talk more about drybrushing after this section, in which we'll combine the two a bit. Washing is a really easy technique to use, and a really easy technique to ruin a model at the same time. Washing can be done with paint or ink, and when I say ink, I mean the acrylic inks you'll see in the same sections as the paint. It will look like strongly colored water, and should be labeled as an ink.

The difference between washing with an ink and paint is primarily a matter of effect, and to some point a matter of control. First, though, let's talk about the technique of washing. In essence, you're taking a diluted solution and allowing it to flow over portions of the miniature. It will collect into the various crevices and put color there. The wash is typically darker than the color you are washing over and it will create shades and lines.

As an example, lets go back to the chainmail we spoke of earlier. Let's say our first step was to simply paint all of the chainmail grey, without drybrushing it. Perhaps because we started with a white primer. All the recesses in the links are now grey, which doesn't really show much depth or shadow. We want black inside the links to show the spaces or holes in the chainmail better. To accomplish this, we wash the model with black ink and the ink naturally settles into all the holes, coloring them all black. Now you have the shadow in the holes, and after it dries, you dry brush lighter shades onto the grey to give it some highlights. That is the idea behind washing a model. You can use it to darken lines between joints, create a line between one section of a model and another, or even to show the deeper areas of the face.

The technique to this is simple. Take the ink out of its pot/bottle and put it on your palette. Either use the back of your brush to dip some out or squeeze a couple of drops out depending on the type of container its in. Dilute the solution with a drop or two of water. You can experiment with exactly how much. Depending on the ink you get, you may need more or less water to dilute it properly. You may even want to use it straight out of the container. The more concentrated, the darker the shades will be. The one or two drops of water is usually a good starting point.

Get some onto your brush and brush the wash onto the section of the model you want to shade. You want to put on a good amount, much more so than you would when simply putting on paint coats. This allows it to flow and run into the crevices. Make sure its distributed nicely, using the brush to spread it out as needed. Don't let it pool up where it shouldn't, it will leave spots or runny lines across the model if you let it pool up inappropriately.

If you have too much, soak it up with the brush and dab it off on a paper towel. Also, be aware that washing over an area will darken the entire area. If you're more selective and only wash into areas you want darkened, this can lessen the overall effect and get the shading only into areas you want them in.

This is easiest to do with ink for a very simple reason. Ink is already very thin so it flows much easier. With paint, you will have to water it down quite a bit. If you add too much water, your paint will eventually lose its cohesion. The acrylic medium (the solution the pigment resides in to be in its liquid state) will eventually become too diluted to hold itself together smoothly and you'll just have grainy stuff in water. It won't go on smoothly. What point this is will vary from paint to paint, even within the same brand of paint. The easy fix is just to add a little more paint and mix it up thoroughly to get it back up to snuff.

The other issue is that as you dilute paint, the amount of pigment per volume changes more quickly than with ink. Ink will eventually lose its cohesion as well, but by then the ink is relatively useless anyway, as it won't put much color onto anything.

The benefit of using paint is that the color is softer, it causes less in the way of harsh lines. So if you're looking for a softer effect, paint works better, like in the case of shading a dress. Ink works better with making darker lines as in segmented armor, chainmail, or machine parts. It would probably be a good guide to say that you should use ink for hard things (metal, wood, ceramics) and paint for soft things (cloth and flesh). Experiment a little with it, but the basic method will do a lot for you.

Another technique similar to washing is known as glazing. Unlike washing, you're not trying to let it run across the model, you're just trying to put a thin coat on everything. Glazing will change the depth and shade of a color across a large surface and can be used to shade in areas with a softer touch. Keep the ink or paint thin while applying it, basically just wetting the surface with the darker color. If applied correctly, it shouldn't run or flow at all. Just keep spreading it out or dabbing it off and then redistributing the glaze so its across the surface as evenly as possible. This will give a darker shade and can give an impression of more depth to the color. This is also a good way of darkening highlights that came out too bright, or darkening a color that came out too brightly.

You can use a glaze, a wash, or a combination of both to also do a light effect. By drybrushing with a lighter color very gently over an area, perhaps even in white, and then glazing it with the color lightly and evenly, you can create a similar light effect to that described above. Use a light, very diluted wash to give it some shade, and you can get a torchlight or lightsaber effect. This is pretty delicate and not quite as specific, however, and is more based in how the dry brush was done as far as pattern goes. The glaze or wash will simply add the color.

If you paint something in white, or even just a lighter shade, you can also tone it down or change its hue with a glaze or wash. An example I've often used is in painting lightning bolts. Let's say you have a blue field, you paint lightning bolts onto a surface with lighter shades of blue, and then inside those lines you paint an even brighter line, and then finally in white. Glazing it with blue ink in successive coats will fade the blues darker and color the white as well. This will darken the blue field, giving it some depth, and with a wash it will give it areas of shadow. The glazes will turn the light blues into darker shades and blur the edges between the colors a bit. Finally, it will turn the white slowly bluish and fade all of it together pretty well. After drying, you can go back and finely detail the lighting bolt with nice stark white lines to get the final effect.

Using this concept, you can create a lot of things from fiery effects to just a simple fade or color transition. Use the ink to lessen the differentiation and to tint each layer of color.

Bringing them Together

Okay, so I promised to talk about combining the two techniques some to create other effects. These are just ways to use drybrushing and washing/glazing together. We covered some of this above, but here are some more little things you can do to accomplish various tasks. Most of these are simple, but use these as a springboard to some of your own ideas. Get creative, be daring; trying new things can open up a new technique or wreck a miniature. Worst case scenario, you'll have to repaint some of it. Best case is that you accomplish something totally new for yourself that you can use in future models. Most everything I've done or explained here is something I discovered myself. Some of them others discovered and passed them onto me. Share your discoveries, let me know what you come up with!

A technique I often use when painting dresses, robes, and the like is a simple one but usually very effective in texture and color. Simply paint the area a your basic color or a shade or two lighter. You can accomplish this by finding the color you want and simply adding some white to it.

After you have carefully placed the base coat, dry brush the entire area with white. Make sure to take a lot of paint out of the brush when you're wiping it off, you want a dusty effect. Put it on thickly, so all the high areas look like they got dusted with flour pretty hard.

Now take the base color and make it a bit darker by either adding an ink to it or just using a darker shade of the color. Water it down like we explained above so that its at least half water if not more, then wash over the areas with it. Be sure and spread the wash over all of it, letting it fill in the crevices and glaze the surface areas. It may take an extra pass or at least another glazing on top of the white areas to get the color right, but between the now grainy wash and the grainy dry brush you should have a pretty good cloth effect on the model!

As an easier alternative, just prime the miniature white and choose a paint a shade darker than you intend. Make a wash out of the paint by adding water, and simply wash it over the white primer. The only problem with this is that the paint will rub off very easily, so don't touch it again until after you've put on some varnish.

A method for painting a bunch of miniatures quickly if you're doing something like a pack of kobolds is to use a technique I refer to as "quick and dirty painting." This works best when the models shouldn't look too clean, and when painting a large pack of something, but can also be used to paint individual miniatures quickly and with little trouble.

Choose a base tone or a common base tone for colors. An example would be to use all colors with a basis in brown, or earthy tones. A good way to assure something like that is to be sure that all colors are a shade of one color, or have that color in it. So, for brown, the entire model would be painted in all the shades from a very dark brown to a very light brown even bordering into white. Any off colors, say green, should have a dab of brown in it to change its tone into an earthier color.

Then choose an extreme highlight color, the highest point on the color scale, in this case a bone white (which is white with a touch of brown). Base coat the model in the various shades and brown-toned colors. Drybrush the entire model bone white and then ink wash the entire model with brown ink. In this example, the entire model would be shaded with browns, all of its colors have a brown tone to them, and the highlight color is a shade of brown. With the ink, all of the colors have been faded down a shade or two, and the miniature is done! You can do this with any color, but brown illustrates the point well.

There is a way of painting metal known as Non-metallic Metal. What this means is that you don't use metallic paints like silver or gold. Instead, you try to represent these with plain colors. There are those out there who can do this so that it really does look metallic. That, frankly, is hard to do and requires some real skill. Here, we'll talk about doing it without needing a degree in art or talking about how to blend paint and use shades of color to represent light, nevermind how light even actually reflects across various surfaces.

The easiest thing here is to have two of the same model and to shine up the one model (or leave it as is) and point a light source on it at the desired angle. This way, you can see how light would actually reflect off the model and what that looks like. In this case, however, we're going to do it the simplest way. Its not necessarily "the right way," but it gets it done, and it can save you from having to buy metallic paint. Its also good when you like your miniatures to look a bit more like they're from something animated.

Let's just do a steel effect, its the same as any other, but it lets me just talk in reference to specific set of colors. Start with a darker grey and base coat all the areas you have determined to be steel. A bluish shade is good here but not necessary.

Add a drop of white paint to it. It should change shade a bit. Now dry brush that color on thickly, covering most everything. Or, you could simply just paint the new color directly over the dark grey base coat, leaving just the deepest parts and joints alone.

Next, add some more white and then dry brush over the last layer pretty thickly. At this point, you should be seeing a few shades showing up, but relatively subtley.

Add a bit more white this time, changing the shade a bit more dramatically. Drybrush a little heavy on prominent areas like the chest, forearms that are sticking out, legs that are out from underneath the character. This will show as having received a bit more light than the rest.

Add some more white and do the same, except lighter, and more towards the edges of pieces, covering a bit less than the last layer.

Add more white, making a pretty drastic change in shade that should be approaching white. Now only dry brush on the most prominent areas and more heavily towards edges.

Finally, with pure white, go back and only dry brush on the parts that really stick out and a couple of protruding edges here and there to create areas that would be "glinting" or the like. Wallah! It'll look like metal, it wasn't too much work, and it didn't take any real artistic talent.

If you have artistic talent, I'm sure you can extrapolate from there how to improve on this basic mechanic. To give some areas a nice shade to contrast the rest, take a black ink or even black paint and selectively wash areas like under the arms, the leg that's more underneath the character, and other places you'd imagine there being a bit more shade. If there's a symbol on the chest or anything like that, its always a good thing to give the underside of it a bit of shade. Carefully put some wash in those areas and let the miniature dry upside down so the wash doesn't trickle down.

Until We Meet Again ...

So we've covered enough now for you to have a decent model in front of you. With these techniques described thus far, you should have a miniature that represents your character pretty well, has the proper colors on it, and even has some highlights and shading. The one thing I've neglected to talk about within the basics of painting is choosing the order in which you do things. I'll take that subject on as well in the next article. We'll also cover a more advanced painting technique that has little to do with trickery and everything to do with brush control. Hopefully by now you have gained some proficiency at this, and even if you think you have a way to go, you'll find each subsequent miniature that much easier to paint.

After those two items are out of the way, we'll cover varnish and start into the idea of converting miniatures, starting with what is sometimes called "kit-bashing," and working into some other ways of modifying a model to better represent your character. In and of itself that is going to cover some new tools into our arsenal. A lot to cover next time, but we'll get through it, and soon we'll be working on decorating our table a bit with set pieces! So, until then, good luck... and keep at it!