Paint Ideas?
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I am working on painting my pieces and have been using spray primer and cheap acrylic paint from Walmart, most units are a single color. This doesn’t always seem to work very well. And as there are more pieces being added my plan was to do like GHG and others do and paint the ends of ships and planes to differentiate the pieces, ex. battleships, heavy battleships, fast battleships. So the question is what is the best paint to use for this as I would really prefer that the paint sticks to the pieces.
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@Super-Semple
Depends on what your paint is doing. If holes are popping up as it dries,(fisheye), you might need to wash the pieces a bit more. -
Over Covid I purchased this game, and decided to paint the pieces. It’s an enormous job. I find painting to be very relaxing, and the board looks fantastic once it starts getting populated with painted pieces. I recently posted a few videos on some game guides I made, and when I get around to it I was going to make a video or two on what I’ve learned about painting. Here’s a link to one of the videos about my colour coding for the game pieces:
https://youtu.be/QO_R3KbTpyo
I am not an expert on painting. But when I started this process, I purchased a set of paints from a company called Army Painter. I have a few paints from Vallejo, and I hear Citadel make excellent paints. I used to paint game pieces with cheaper paints from Michaels, but the difference in quality is very noticeable. The cheaper paints are often a little chalky, and it goes on thicker, so you lose a lot of detail - especially on sculpts as small as A&A. If you’re going to invest the time to do all this painting, you owe it to yourself to invest a few extra bucks on some good paint.
When I first started, I was priming everything in white, grey or black. I now prime all the pieces in the base colour of the country I’m painting. All of these paint companies have spray primers that are exactly matched to their bottled paints. Priming with the nation’s base colour saves me hours.
I usually am doing multiple colours on each sculpt. The more different colours on the pieces, the longer the process, so I try to keep it to two or three colours per unit. And I will paint like an assembly line. For instance, I recently did a bunch of Soviet vehicles. I did 4 or 5 sculpts of mech infantry, motorized infantry, light, medium and heavy tanks, and Katyushas. So I sprayed the bottoms with black. Then I flipped them and sprayed the tops and sides with forrest green (my Soviet base colour). I used gun metal for tracks, dark grey for tires, desert yellow for the truck canvas, and I added a touch of red to each vehicle just to make them stand out as Soviet since my USA base colour is a different shade of green.
I highly recommend looking into washes and maybe even dry brushing. Those two techniques are relatively quick and easy, but will change your units from OK to spectacular. Here’s a photo of a few vehicles I finished yesterday, and a couple artillery that I’ve only base-coated. The base coat looks very flat compared to the vehicles with the dark wash. And the better the sculpt, the better the wash looks (i.e. any pieces I’ve purchased from HBG look fantastic, any pieces original to my A&A games look pretty good.)
My final step is to spray the pieces with a matte varnish so the paint doesn’t rub off. Ultimately I’d like to add decals, but that’s a challenge I’m not quite ready to tackle… -
@Super-Semple : As @Ghetty pointed out, cheap acrylic plaint from Walmart may be your problem.
For the most basic colours I bought spray paint made for plastic at a hardware store that includes the primer, then add a spray-on varnish for plastic models when I am done.
For additionnal colours, especially if you are trying to match the HBC or AA out-of-box colours, I buy Tamiya model paints and also add the varnish when I am done.
While it’s popular, I personnaly don’t like painting the ends of planes or ships. That is why we buy so many different sculpts. You get to recognize them pretty quickly.
I only made an exception for black and white lines on air transports (this is a picture, not my models!).
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@noneshallpass I’d love to see some photos of your sculpts. Have you posted them anywhere? I’m using A&A Global pieces, which have different sculpts for each power. But for units like Tank Destroyers that aren’t in A&A, I purchased a bunch of a single sculpt and painted them for each power. I do colour code the tips of the barrels because there are so many different tank-looking vehicles, but you’re right, you learn to recognize them pretty quickly.
And I’m curious where you purchase sculpts. I’m looking for cavalry in particular. Gurkhas and sea planes, too.
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@ghetty You should use risk cavalry.
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@ghetty If you don’t mind the cost, HBG has a decent array of 3D printed seaplanes.
They also have calvary, which come in several colors. (Or you can use risk calvary if you are cheep.)
As for Gurkhas, you can use chips, or use 1/72 infantry or HBG’s Mountain troops. -
@super-semple Go with Tamiya. That’s what many use including myself and have never had paint chip off.
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