More painted pieces for consideration

@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.

Thank you both so much, I feel a lot better about painting now.  :-D

Been a while since I painted but I got the psycho paint brush and all of the Japanese units I wanted from HBG so now I will begin my goal of finishing the Japanese Air Force. Here is how I will be painting the Tony fighters. It was my first attempt at this level of detail and it will take some fine tuning but I am happy with the first one.

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HBG Kaga with the Standard of Admiral of IJN on its Deck

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kaga 1.jpg

@jluna1273:

Toblerone77,

Question for you: how did you get the “CUSTOMIZER” tab on your profile?

Marc has your answer pretty much there. The link kind of shows why, what, when ,where and who made this happen.

There are people here a lot better than me on a lot of subjects involving customization and HRs/game ideas, and I was surprised I even received it.

“Customizer” covers a lot and I’m sure in time others will be awarded this badge. For myself I nominated a few who really showed they were doing a lot for the game. Most notably “Most Holy” and “alllworkandnoclay” they both paint and Most Holy is the host of Dicestruction podcast. This to my knowledge is the only podcast which features Axis & Allies exclusively. These guys were just a couple whom I nominated. I asked a few people to move allworkandnoclay’s thread to customizations to help all those who paint and customize their units as a tool.

The credit for much of this goes to YoungGrasshopper who suggested the badge for Der Kuenstler initially, whom I also nominated for his war room and his HR work.

What’s your running cost for a fully painted set of say… one nation?

Is it per piece or?

Like if I take my Europe, OOB set of German pieces, and send them to him, what would you expect the price range to be?

what was the outcome of this?
was the pieces returned?

since its christmas please tell me this had a happy outcome  :-)

(just curious, I haven’t bought anything from mclovin)

“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!