AAA50th painted minis

@cavestone I also use vallejo paints. The key question here is are you brush painting, or using an airbrush, or both?

The Vallejo paints have a “Model Air” line that comes pre-thinned. You can buy a thinning product (from them) to add to the “Model Color” series paints, which are the exact same thing, just more concentrated and thicker.

If you’ve never used an airbrush, its a bit finicky–it requires regular cleaning and a without a good brush and compressor the paint will flow very inconsistently. The process will be very frustrating unless you use the pre-thinned paints because the brush can only blow paint that is within a certain set of thickness parameters that are difficult to achieve, especially if you are trying to mix the air in the brush’s reserve or in small quantities. That’s why having copies of both Model Air and Model Color is fine by me–unlike Warhammer 40K I’m using primarily earthy colors, greens, dunkelgelb and dunkelgrau… other AFV and camoflage colors and so i don’t need a collection of primary or bright colors.

But I recommend it. The airbrush creates a sublime, beautiful layer and slight mix variations can be used to create shadows, grades, etc. Then you go back over with your brush, adding highlights, lines, details. Then, back over again with a drybrushing…then back to the airbrush to blast Flory Wash all over it.

Can’t see your photos, you can’t post photos until you have a certain post count. I wouldn’t use water to thin paints, they are water soluble but the mix and viscosity is all wrong (though water is obv. cheap and easy to clean up)

As for oil-based paints, these require thinner to clean up, they are much more difficult to drybrush with and are not used for airbrushing. The days of the old testors paints is long behind us–even apple barrel paints are easier to work with and cheaper. The early painting methods were much more about glomming thick layers of paint onto lead miniatures and the modern approach with water based paint and a series of different techniques creates much better results.

https://www.facebook.com/pg/Landing-Vehicle-Tracked-LVT4-2017381051873202/photos/?tab=album&album_id=2201403350137637

I’ve always had a problem with HBG’s “orange” Japanese units not being of the same tone of orange from OOB A&A… most other colors of custom HBG units seem to match pretty good, but that orange always seemed off to me… so much so I’ve never kept a custom HBG Japanese unit in my nation bins… sad, cuz I really like some of them.

(and yes, I’m one of those anal-retentive guys where if the color is just off a tad, it “ruins” it for me… I know I’m odd that way).

P.S.
Dang, I just realized this forum won’t let you use the first three letters of Japanese units without blanking it out as a profanity.

Very nice work. I’m way too unsteady of hand and mind to pull that off.

So very true. When I first started painting my aircraft I had to include decal roundels for the players to distinguish the pieces from one another. My naval units are painted mostly with a color scheme for playability except for the capital ships like the Carriers and popular Battleships. All of them have a decal or flag to show which nation they belong too. I actually replaced the OOB British Cruisers because I thought they looked too close in size with the destroyers. I ended up replacing with some ships I found on Shapeways. The biggest problem I had with naval units is that they can exist in the same seazone with enemy pieces unlike land territories. Because of this I decided to keep the subs, destroyers, cruisers and non unique battleships following a color scheme. There are so many colors in the spectrum though we should be able to come up with a solution that will make them look more historical yet keep the pattern or color scheme for the nation. I really would love to paint all the ships historically and maybe I will revisit them again someday. Every time I go back and repaint my pieces I seem to get better at it. Or at least I think I do, hehe.

@elrojo33:

That would be my answer. Anyway, I’ll keep an eye out. If I come across some I will let you know.
Happy hunting.

Thanks much.

“painted playing pieces” are just that, decals are way out of scale, not the emblem the plastic of the decal itself is too nasty on minis this size. These paint jobs are amazing!

@BluGerman:

today i managed to read through this year long forum thread and I have to ask what happened after November 17th 2011?.. did everybody in this forum mysteriously dissapear? or was it just discontinued? or was it moved to another forum thread or something?.. somebody please let me know because I was really excited to see Allworks whole board with his miniatures (they are awesome!)

In answer to your question- I don’t really know.  :? Allworkandnoclay is an artist who does all sorts of other work for money, not just Axis and Allies. I presume that he moved on to other work, as his Flickr account shows him doing some sculpting and what not. To be honest though, he stopped posting pics, people stopped commenting, and it sort of fell of the face of the earth. There’s some stuff on TallPaul’s page, and there are plenty of other artists with some awesome stuff if you need your daily fix of painted minis!