How do I became a better painter?

Most miniature painters are thought the basic Gamesworkshop method of painting. Or the slapchop method. These both create reliable an predictable results which makes them a good choice for beginners. These methodes usually create darker and uninteresting results. They usually lack in story and a reason to keep looking for longer than a few seconds. There is also a skill sealing you can reach here. There really is no way to go if this is the only painting you ever do. Your skills improve by getting faster at doing the thing you do. Results dont really improve a whole lot.

But what to do? What makes someone better at painting? I´ll try to answer that in this post.

Covering neat layers. Lack of fundamentals.

Fundamentals carry you further than any eccentric light scheme, style or story ever could. If you dont know how to put neat covering layers on the ”canvas”, you should not be trying to paint anything fancy or effects. Lacking in understanding of fundamentals becomes painfully clear even with the most basic of paint jobs. If you dont but miniatures together well, leave gaps, mold lines, etc. Your glorious painting skills cannot really save the piece anymore!

Study and exercise brushcontrol. Sometimes its just that you need to be able to paint thinner lines or glaze more carefully. Learn how to load your brush with paint correctly for the task you are doing at the moment. Use time to tarin these skills. Try to actively think about your brushes behavior and if you do mistakes, think about how those happened! Remember to breath correctly and enough. Painting skill is kind of a muscle that needs constant training or it will degrade over time.

If you cannot paint a neat opaque basecoats/layers, no amount of blending will save you.

You have to be able to build your miniatures well, basecoat them with covering paint neatly and you have to know how to apply addition layers with suitable opaqueness level to your needs. Doing these well will carry you more further than any amount of cool effects will ever do. When we have these down, we need to be able to adjust to our surroundings and tools/paints. We need to be able to replicate the results at any given time of the year, with paints we have on our arsenal.

When you have the fundamentals of the craft, then you can proseed to understanding light and shadows.

And with understanding of these fundamentals we can proceed to higher levels of painting skill!

Pushing lightness both up and down. Painting more bravely with values.

By pushing value contrast up, you let people see from further away your miniature. It creates intrest and story. Not everything is in equal amount of light and that creates the interest. Really dark pieces look boring especially in low light situations. Remember that if you want to paint darkness, you have to have light to show it! If you want to paint something very very very bright, yo uhave to have darkness to show the bright! Creater light creates greater shadow. Softer, dimmer light creates softer shadows.

By going brighter, you push yourself to understand how light plays and works. This skill is fundamental to your progress. You cannot become better if you dont study light.

Because miniatures are small, we need to push the lights more and push the shadows more. If we dont, we cannot really see what is happening. We can exaggerate to create more feeling for the story or to create narrative focus.

The subject of light is infinitely complex. You don´t have to be a master to start using it. Your mastery of light will grow with your skills as a painter.

Paint more. And paint with purpose. Learning to adjust to your surroundings (winter, summer etc)

Most good painters paint a lot with purpose. They set their mind on thing they want to do or improve. By painting with purpose you are not waffing around and putting effort into a thing you have chosen to be important. You will have to step out of your comfort zone and you will have to do it with purpose. This thing you are choosing needs to be real concrete thing! You must also be patient and resilient to failure. You have to also invest time to painting things that will not all be bangers.

For an example: I want to achieve neat covering layers. I want to paint thinner lines. I want to create smooth blends through glazing and velatura. I want to try another methode of painting red. I want to push more colour into my shadows. I want to use more underpainting with my work. I want to learn to wetblend speedpaint together. I will try to paint volumetric highlights to this piece.

If you choose something like, I want to paint better. What that even means. Its so abstract that you cannot tell yourself what are the steps to take you there! You need to be able to explain the steps.

You also neet to adjust your painting methodes at times. Maybe your paints dry quicker at dry winters or hot summers? Maybe its so humid that paints dont seem to dry at all? Maybe the sun is a deadly laser and drys your paint into the bristless? You have to learn to adjust your paints to your own circumstanses.

Not thinking about the miniature in a setting doing something. What is the light source? Where are they. What I want to convey though my colour choices and by the amount of light I choose to use.

This is a hard task. Atleast for me. I have painted many miniatures and many nmm study pieces like they are in a white room. To create interest, is to create stories. You have to have a story. They dont have to be something particularly perplexing or complex masterpieces. Remember that action movies exist and are fairly popular. Some even like starwars! The story can be simple and cool. But remember! If the canvas is bigger, you need a bigger story!

These gaming pieces are fighting in the dessert at noon is a good enough story.

Their tank or a leader might showing spoils of the war, or more of complex scene in the war. Like going over an enemy fortification or looking at laid out map to create strategies for your troop.

Use light and the ”surroundings” of your pieces to inform you of your colour choices and light values. Create contrast through your narrative. You dont need to add more contrast for the sake of adding more contrast.

Going too complex too quickly. Or leaving things too dull. To find beauty, it is to find whats really there in the moment.

You have to gather skills slowly. Nobody can do it quickly. If you have just started to paint edgehighlights, you shouldnt paint osl, douple light scene, volumetry, underpainting shadows and nmm all on the next piece. You will only get overwhelmed and frustraded. You will mostlikely not learn anything from any of those subjects and just create a mess. Start with one thing and when that things basics comes naturally, maybe then add more complexity.

Adding more information to the observer to read through painting. Is a good way to create story and interest. How ever this is a skill you need to learn. Paint thinner lines. Smaller dots. More subttle lines and dots. More colours hidden in the shadows. Creating a more complex highlight pattern than just with white and edge highlights.

Go look for references in the nature. See how rocks are not just grey. See how trees are not brown. See how leaves are not only green and how the sky can be a many different shades of blue, green, yellow, red or orange! Water is not always blue and snow is not really white at all. We see these things so often that our brains in their lazyness makes an assumption of rock equals grey, woods equals brown etc… Try to brake those assumptions and go looking for beauty!

Replication is the first part of understanding. By replicating you are fundamentally breaking down the subject in question and creating kind of a recipe for your brains mental map of understanding the light behavior.

With these reference examples you can go find your own! I especially like to use the picture of my dog in the summer sun. Its an awesome picture that shows light behavior on the black fur surface!

And with these pieces of wisdom I have spoken the absolute truth with no narrative bias! Paint bravely and try to find joy in training your skills!

PS:I have been away a lot recently and its been hard to find motivation to do blog posts. I have gathered some ideas again and now with maybe more time to paint in my hands, I should be able to continue! I am not yet sure what kind of a rythm I should be doing, butI will figure it out soon enough! It has not helped that Kaiden has abandoned the blog and the discord server, but atleast I hope they are hitting their toe very hard on the table leg.

Hop on to the discord and show us your painting results when you are using these methods to grow as a painter! https://discord.gg/g5RgrAaj