KV Paint job

KV Paint job at
http://members.xoom.com/rlyehable/images/ft/shippicts/kvpaint.jpg

comments appreciated.
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G'day Brian,

Nice, the lime stripes are an interesting touch mind you;)

Happy painting

Beth

> KV Paint job at

Interesting. The lime is probably a good idea to help it show up against a
dark background--which may not be what you want in "real life" but
certainly is a good idea for your minis. I had my KV painted dark metallic
green
with metallic purple tigershark stripes--all well and good for display,
but I kept worrying about stepping on them during play. I've just finished
repainting them bronze with dioxazine purple markings, and I am pondering
whether to give them a bronze wash, or a light dusting of the metallic green,
before I lacquer them.

I'm also wondering what sort of script the KV have. I'm thinking it should be
angular, like runic, but perhaps based on a triangular outline.

> At 09:43 PM 7/25/00 -0400, you wrote:

Take a look at the "Martian Hull Markings", at <
http://www.io.com/~sjohn/fonts.htm >

It's freeware font, and quite nice. And the "Sparks" paper miniatures on one
of his other pages are interesting too...budget miniatures, for those who
prefer coloring to painting.

> At 11:26 PM -0400 7/25/00, John Crimmins wrote:

And some other useful things: like an icosahedral planetary map
(http://www.io.com/~sjohn/geomap.htm) Although I always preferred the
idea of holding hex size constant and varying the number of hexes (# on side
of a triangle is equal to Traveller world size for #someUsefulHexSize)

> KV Paint job at

OK, looks as if you started with a purple base coat, splotched with black, and
then finished with green striping. Lurid, but not a bad combo all told.

Here's what I's suggest to spruce it up:

After applying the base coat, drydrush with a lighter shade to bring out the
panels and raised area. Do the same, very carefully, with a grey on the black
areas. By brushing only the center portion of each black area, you'll get the
sense of depth AND a heightened differentiation between the two colors (the
purple and black, that is). If you feel ambitious, you can pick out individual
small panels for contrast in any given area, though I'd advise to use a
lighter color rather than a darker one for this.

Toodles.

> KV Paint job at

> Here's what I's suggest to spruce it up:

> black areas.

If that's too much work, I've been able to get away with a *subtle* drybrush
of light grey, regardless of the basic colour. You definitely need something
to de-camouflage it. At the moment, it's "Standard KraVak Disruptive"
that works all too well. The detail is lost in the paint job.

Take a look at the OU ships on my web site. Remember that the basic model
doesn't have a heck of a lot of gross detail, it's rather subtle. Then allow
for the
4-colour shapes, white lines, spirals, dots, stripes etc.

Thanks for the input!

The jpeg does not show it very well, but the base color is Mauve (as in
MT),
the spots are actually J.A. Green (dark, dusty green), and the stripes are
bright green. I chose the mauve and green carefully. But I knew that the
scheme would appear too flat. So I added the bright green stripes. The other
advantage of this scheme is that it can be repeated on both small and large
ships.

Drybrushing: I have tried this, but failed utterly. I guess that I have too
heavy a hand or use too thick of paints (even if I thin them substantially).

Washes: I do even worse with washes.

I did plan one more detail to add. I have some blue ink wash that I planned
to pick out the panels with. The idea is to add a UV-ish cast to the
colors. I will try it tonight or tommorow and let you know the results (it
won't show up on a.jpeg if I do it right).

The other thing that I may do is to add some shadow to the spots with black
paint on 2/3rds of each spot (consistant direction). Takes extra time,
but can be effective. The downside is that spots that hit the outline of the
miniature will not have a shadow. :-/

I am also in the process of adding tiger-ish black stripes to my larger
ESU ships. I did the Komorov and it came out looking good (to my eyes). But I
will recieve the same (constructive) criticism, it does not have panels
highlighted.

-----
Brian Bell bkb@beol.net
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> -----Original Message-----
[quoted original message omitted]

> "Bell, Brian K" wrote:

> Drybrushing: I have tried this, but failed utterly. I guess that I

Could be the opposite - I find drybrushing works better with a good,
solid
consistency of paint - too thin and it smears instead of picking the
highlights (and if it's too thin it won't cover the darker main coat).

As Allen already mentioned, you have it wrong. Personally, I _do_ thin
my paint before dry brushing, and then use tissue or old (clean) denim to soak
up the paint until I can't see any come off the brush onto the denim. Then I
apply light strokes. I do use a rather large brush (1 or bigger). The reason I
like to thin the paint first is so that the dry brushing does not produce a
grainy surface.

Washes are one thing that takes a while to learn to do well (unless you have
someone show you). One thing that I did for a long time was to try to apply
too much at once. If you have too much on the brush, you have a very ugly
result. What happens is that the ink (or thinned paint) moves to the outside
of the wet area and then dries before the solvent, leaving an ugly ring of
colour. What you want to do is to use about the same amount of fluid in the
brush as you have when painting a thin coat, but that fluid should be very
thin.

What I did after much frustration and poor results was to paint an entire 25mm
figure using inks on a white base coat. This gave me a much better feel for
the ink and how it flows and dries. It was a very cool experiment that turned
out to one of my better paint jobs. It was very slow, though. Black took
something like 12 coats, with at least an hour of drying between each one. The
only parts that needed acrylics were the exposed metal details. Maybe I'll try
scanning it at work tomorrow.

> Drybrushing: I have tried this, but failed utterly. I guess that I have

I have used a similar effect, but instead of using a blue ink I painted the
area black and then dry brushed with very dark blue. If you plan to do it over
lighter colours, then I recommend adding a small amount of blue to whatever
colour you are painting over and then dry brushing with the mix. Pick the
shade of blue so that it will make the mixed colour lighter than the original
colour and you can save yourself an extra step.

Hope this helps,