Friday, February 8, 2019

Taking the Green


Last week I did a few YouTube Live painting sessions to demonstrate the use of oils on the Song of Ice and Fire miniatures.  In this case, it was a slightly different "alternate" theme for the Night's Watch.  While the overall color set was still meant to be dark, I also had to incorporate a variety of greens, blue greens and grayish greens onto the cloaks and clothes.


Even the bases were treated differently, using my new home made grass and shrub tufts!


In addition to standard oil paints, I also used the Mig Ammo Oilbrushers.  These are very handy, as the containers cannot be damaged or punctured like regular oil paint tubes!  Makes it easier to store and take on the road with you.

I also spend a lot of time showing how to use white spirits, which are very gentle on brushes, paints, and your sense of smell. That is very important... more than you might think.

Over and over again I emphasize the idea that thinner paint will stick to thicker paint, and in reverse too.  The ideal use of the oil paints is discussed... in particular for army painting.


While they can make that process much faster, the key aspect of oil paints is that they don't dry so rapidly, which gives you so much more time to make incredible wet blends across an entire unit all at once!  This would be impossible with standard acrylics.  You might be able to wet blend one... perhaps 2 at a time, but not a dozen, or 2 dozen!


I did my first few live sessions to get a better handle on how that works on YouTube.  Things constantly change in the way you have to set them up, so I started out by using those oils, where I could relax a bit, and not be as frenzied as the usual acrylic lessons :-)

Here's a link to the first live YouTube Session:



This is the follow up session a few days later: