Airbrushing Infinity Miniatures

Airbrushes have come from the realm of scale model painting to a well-established position in the tabletop miniature hobby, and rightly so. Airbrushes not only help speed up the process of painting, they also lay down such gentle and thin layers of paint that don't obscure the delicate detail of Infinity miniatures.

I typically use an airbrush as a beginning stage to lay down my foundation color on large areas of the miniature. Join me and I'll take you through my 5-step process that gives me a nice base-color with a little shading and highlighting as a basis for the rest of my shading and highlighting work.

Step 1 - Choose your colors.
You need your base color, a shading color, and a highlight.
In this case, my base color is the now out of production (OOP) Hawk Turquoise from Games Workshop.
To shade it, I chose OOP Dark Flesh from Games Workshop.
Side note: lately I haven't been using black to shade my models, but instead choose a color opposite of my base on the color wheel for shading. More on that at another time.
The third paint I chose was Vallejo Model Color Pale Blue, which is a really nice Turquoise with a little more green and white in it than Hawk Turquoise - perfect for highlighting.

Step 2 - Base Coat.
Mix your base color with some thinner (whatever you use - I use a mix of water and isopropanol) in a cup and load your airbrush. Apply a decent coat over the entire model as I have done below.

Step 3 - Shade

Mix your shade color into your base color and add some thinner. Don't over do it, you don't want your transitions to be too stark. In my case, I added OOP Dark Flesh to my OOP Hawk Turquoise in about a 1:2 ratio.  

This is where the fun begins. Apply this color only in the lower parts of the model and the areas that would actually be shaded. If it helps, try to spray from an angle underneath the model, shooting upwards. This is why I have attached my models to these old paint pots as I can handle the models well spray and get different angles that I need. 

See below. 

Stage 4 - Highlight

Pull out your highlight color. In this case, I didn't mix my highlight into my base color, since they are already very similar hues of color, but different values. 

With the highlight, I hold the models at an angle and spray downwards onto them. I do this from varying degrees until I am happy with how it looks. At this stage, the contrasts will be a little too strong so we are going to tone it down a bit. 

Stage 5- Tie it together

As a final step, I mix my base color with a lot of thinner. I want a translucent coat to go down, that won't remove all the work I've just done. 

Now what I do is spray the model all around at a 90 degree angle, hitting the models mid-section and lower. I leave the brightest highlights alone at the top of the model. See how it looks below. 

And that is how I get a nice foundation of my base color, shaded and highlighted before I break my traditional brush and go to work. I'll still do a fair amount of shading and highlighting - especially some hard-edge highlighting, but at least this gets me 75% of the way there. 

I hope you've found this useful and inspiring. Get out your airbrush and see what you can do!

Technocubes from Bostria

Terrain is on of the challenges and joys of the Infinity hobby. You need a decent amount of it and it needs to be different than 40k terrain - which is readily available.

When I first started looking at this game, something caught my eye. It was these green technocubes made by Bostria on the Infinity forums. They were smooth and high tech, and the green was very pleasing to the eye -  just like Infinity. 

I looked them up on-line but could only find templates for one of 3 different models, but I found all of the wall texture files. After about a year of meaning to do something, my office was throwing out a whole bunch of foamcore and being the dumpster-diving terrain builder that I am, I plucked out the choice-pieces and brought them home to begin my work. 

You really need a T-square and very sharp exacto-knife for this kind of thing. And you've got to have patience and go slowly. Measure, then measure twice. Cut once lightly, then again twice more very gently to get straight even lines on your foamcore. Then you have to measure out your sides and print your wall textures to fit. It can be slow going and it's precise work. I'm not sure if this is less effort than painting them yourself but it requires far less skill. Anyone can make these. There are no special skills required. 

Final pics will be posted, along with instructions and image files for the wall textures. 

Tim's Painting Studio

So I think you can see from these photos that I am not the most organized artist out there. My workbench is pretty cluttered and filled with little paint pots. It's got soul though and I still get lots of work done in this little cave. 

Here you can see my wet pallet, my airbrush cleaning pot, my horde of little paints and my current project. Yep...14 long fangs have been commissioned from a gent in Florida. It's quite a project and I am stunned that I've been able to maintain a high level of painting on these guys.

Behind them in this shot you can see my next commission...6 Alpha Legion Dreads. Good god, I will never get to my own figs again!

My trusty airbrush, Iwata Eclipse. What a beaut!

I find heads are much easier to paint off the model than on them. These ones here are prepped for priming and then base coating with the airbrush. It'll be a great experience to paint all 14 in one go.

Although banner are pretty ridiculous for modern warfare, I do love how they look. 

This is a piece of work my wife did for my birthday. My favorite image in my whole "studio."

Builder vs. Collector

You ever reach a point where you realize that you've managed to accrue more models or miniatures than you'll ever be able to build? That's the point you shift, officially, from a Builder to a Collector. I hit that point years ago with my scale model collection, but now I'm approaching it with my wargaming collect...uh... backlog. Since starting Infinity about a year ago, my 40k stuff has been put on hold. What stuff? A whole Death Korps army, a bunch of Space Marines, and a few Tau XV9 suits. And 2 titans, but we won't discuss them.


Here's a current photo of my workbench. You can see at the top of the picture there are two XV9 suits ready to be painted. Next to them is a great bag of human skulls from Secret Weapon Miniatures. Further to the right is a Gang from Necromunda (displaced from their foam by the forces of the Jade Empire...). To the left is a stack of 4 new Yu Jing blisters (plus Sforza...). The work area is occupied by my "second round" of Infinity minis- Celestial Guard special weapons, some Ninjas, a HMG Hsien, some Yaozao, a Sophotect, a Su-Jian, and a Garuda. These guys (and gals) are about 90% complete, but I know sooner rather than later I'll wind up with another stack in the background...

Vallejo paints are scattered on the bench- I've started transitioning from GW to Vallejo because there is more variation and also the paint containers are far more practical. Anyway, just another post to remind everybody that we're still alive and kicking. Maybe I should shoot to complete the 3rd batch by the time we hit 100 followers. LOL