All posts filed under: Articles

How to Photograph Your Mini

Huge List of Tutorials for Miniature Photography

Published by Joe B

You spent all this time to build and paint your mini, and now it’s time to share it with the world. Do yourself (and your work of art) a favor and take a bit of extra time to take the best picture you can. Below I’ve put together a bunch of tutorial links on miniature photography to help you do just this. I must admit that it kills me a bit inside when I see what could be a fantastic looking model but it’s hard to see because it was snapped on a busy desk or a bit blurry. As many of the articles below prove, you don’t need a fancy camera and photo studio to take good pictures. Just a bit of setup and care. So dive into the tutorial and find a few things that you could improve to improve your model’s glamor shot. Miniature Photography Basics For some good start-to-finish tutorials, these guides to miniature photography will help you get going. From something as simple as leaning a piece of paper against …

Finishing Touches for your model

Comprehensive Tutorials for Finishing Touches on your Model

Published by Joe B

Life doesn’t always go as planned, so instead of finishing my Mentor Legion Dreadnought, and writing up another epic tutorial I’ve been reveling in the blessings of Papa Nurgle. But all is not lost! Instead I have pulled together a collection of links to help you providing the finishing touches on your models. I reached out to the Dreadtober members for their favorites and scoured my bookmarks. So enjoy the list, learn some new tricks, and finish your models! – Oh, and if you have a tutorial you want added, just drop it in the comments below and I’ll check it out! Weathering Some love it, others hate it, but adding wear and tear to a model can add a level of realism. Adding weathering is also a great way to cover up mistakes in the painting, or even the physical model. Weapon Damage Special Effects | WIP Watch This: Weathering a Tank | Broken Paintbrush Weathered Iron Metal | Weeman Heavy Weathering on tank | Panzermeister36 Salt chipping | Scale War Machines Panel Line …

Build and Paint a Custom Base

Building and Painting a Custom Base

Published by Joe B

A model’s base can be tricky business. Make it too simple, and the model looks simple, make it too busy, and it drowns out the model. One solution is to buy some of the amazing resin bases on the market, but sometimes you want to create a custom base yourself. So let’s do it. Today is a tutorial on building a custom base with spare bits, clay, and sand. After completing the base, I add a few extra tips on painting it. While this one is more of an urban ruin, you can also check out my tutorial for a muddy base. FYI: this is a huge post with a ton of pictures. If you aren’t able to read it now or want to save it for later, I put it into a PDF to download as well! Just skip to the form at the bottom, I will then email you the link to download whenever you want. Planning Your Base Yeah, I’ve been harping on this work ‘plan’ for a bit lately, but it …

Mentor Legion Painting Guide for the base colors

Painting the Mentor Legion Dreadnought Part 1

Published by Joe B

Ready to start painting your model but not sure how to begin? In today’s tutorial I will show you how to paint a Mentor Legion Dreadnought with plenty of tips and tricks that you can apply to your own models. This is part two of this six-part series for Dreadtober 2016. Last week I showed you my processes for building a custom model through kit bashing. In this post we do all the main colors, leaving the final details for another tutorial. The Mentors are a great chapter to teach a bunch of different colors as they have white (gloriously hard white!), dark green and red, and I even throw in some yellow to mark them as the second company. Add in the metallics, cabling, lenses, and later detail work I am pretty confident that there will something in here for you. Getting Started We left of last week’s tutorial with an assembled model ready for paint. So the first thing to do is give him a coat of primer. The primer does two things: …

Tutorial on building a custom model with bit bashing and scuplting

How to Build a Custom Model Through Kitbashing

Published by Joe B

Sometimes you are going for a unique look, other times you want to add new dynamism to a model. Either way, learning how to build a custom model through kitbashing is an excellent way to make something truly yours. For my examples, I use a Space Marine Dreadnought. They are boxy, unwieldy beasts of a model that are cool, but static looking. I want to fix that problem and show you how I took a Blood Angels Furioso Dreadnought and turned it into a charging Ironclad for my Mentor Legion. Making a Plan As with any project, it’s important to have at least a rough idea of where you are going. It can change, reform, and flow as your build the model and get further inspiration. For this dreadnought, I had a Furioso model sitting in my bits box from the Baal campaign box set (really got it for the Tyranid models). I needed something to build and paint to create these tutorials for Dreadtober and thought it would fit the bill nicely. That and …

How to plan your hobby projects

Planning Your Hobby Project

Published by Joe B

Between piles of gray sprues, dozens on unfinished models, and perhaps a few pieces of terrain, you might be feeling a bit overwhelmed by what is supposed to be your hobby. I’m hoping that my notes below will help you with planning your hobby projects and get some of them done. Unfortunately, too many people think of planning and organizing from school days. It was a chore, something that was graded. Instead, the planning process I’m talking about here is how I organize my hobby projects and blog posts. It brings enough order to my chaotic life so that I am able keep from getting overwhelmed. Why Plan For me, there are three big reasons to plan: 1. Create Mile Stones Buy, build, and paint a whole new army is a ton of work. For most of us, this is an overwhelming about of work before it’s done. But break that down into buy, build, and paint a new unit or character – and that becomes a whole lot more manageable. It’s no longer this …

Guest Author D Powers on the Mindset of Painting

Guest Post: The mindset of painting

Published by Lonely Kitbasher

Hallo!  D Power from I’m Alone with a Dream here.  In this guest post, I’d like to ramble on a bit about a favored hobby horse; the mindset behind PAINTING. I’ve known of people starting out collecting and painting wargaming miniatures with high hopes and great excitement. Later they become frustrated with what, in truth, is their own style of painting that’s trying to develop– while they repress it with images of what they think is “correct.” Something like what the ‘Eavy Metal studio has produced. While you get neither points nor bad marks for imitating someone’s work you admire, you should not be discouraged from being yourself. Nobody is Norman Rockwell A veteran illustrator friend of mine told me of a time when Norman Rockwell was so popular that everyone tried to imitate him, putting others down for not copying the “proper” style.  While this peer pressure isn’t quite so present in the wargaming community, some people tend to think it is, and that’s sad really. Time passed, and because nobody was Norman Rockwell, nobody …

How to Paint Joe Diamond from Mansions of Madness

Painting Joe Diamond a Mansions of Madness Tutorial

Published by Joe B

Mansions of Madness provides a great mix characters to investigate the mysteries. Some are the intellectuals to solve riddles, and others are like Joe Diamond. A classic Noir PI, he has his duster flapping and pistols ready. Unlike Noir, I wanted Joe to have some color – makes the game more fun in a way. So a red duster, yellow tie, and bright white hat and shirt fit the bill. All the paints used were from the Vallejo range. You can grab all the colors with either the Game Color Set or the Skintones Set. Shirt, Shoes, Hat Game Color Wolf Grey Game Color Sombre Grey Game Color Dead White Jacket, Pants Game Color Charred Brown Game Color Beastly Brown Duster Model Color Scarlett Red Game Color Tan Game Color Khaki Game Color Red Wash Tie, Hatband Game Color Gold Yellow Game Color Sun Yellow Skin Model Color Mahogany Brown Game Color Parasite Brown Game Color Brown Rose Model Color Dark Brown Wash Base Coats The first step was to paint all the base colors throughout …

Status 6 Weeks into having Guest Authors

Guest Post Status – Six Weeks In

Published by Joe B

About two months ago I put a call out for guest writers on Broken Paintbrush. I wanted to add some diversity of thought to the site, new perspectives on the hobby, and give others a chance to write. We are now six weeks in and I wanted to share the guest post status and do another call out for anyone interested. To date, I’ve had four guest writers and five posts (Thor has gone twice already!).  I’ve received emails and ideas from five more writers who I hope to post soon as well. My hope is that after showing you what other guest writers have done, it will get you to think about writing as well! Thor Talks about Blogging The first guest I had, and now twice, is Thor from Creative Twilight. He started a series where he will discuss how to improve our blogs, tailored specifically to us hobbyists. His second post dived into the importance of writing a strong title for your article. While Thor has his own awesome blog, he decided to …

Painting Guide for the Chthonians from Mansions of Madness

Chthonian Painting Tutorial for Mansions of Mansions

Published by Joe B

One of the scarier monsters of the game, the Chthonian are otherworldly monsters that appear from nowhere and swallow up the investigators.  Below I’ve put together a painting guide on how painted these beasts. Chthonian Painting List When I painted the Chthonians, I was going for a contrast: ‘natural’ colors for the main skin and strong colors for the tentacles. With that, I’ve put together the paints used before for reference Game Color Sombre Grey Game Color Wolf Grey Game Color Dark Green Wash Game Color Royal Purple Game Color Charred Brown Game Color Tan Game Color Warlord Purple Game Color Squid Pink Model Color Basic Skintone Model Color Scarlett Red Game Color Black Painting the Chthonian Skin For the skin, I started with gray dry brushes followed up with green and purple washes. This helped to create something that looked almost natural. Base Colors As with all my models, I paint the main colors so I can get a  sense of proportions between each block. The main body was done with Sombre Gray, the …

Guest Interview with Adam Jones of The Golden D6

Published by Joe B

I have a special guest interview as today’s guest post. One of the great things about our hobby is being able to connect with so many people all over the globe. And almost exactly a year ago I wouldn’t have been able to tell you anything about Adam Jones. Until out of the blue, he reaches out to me on Twitter saying he has a crazy idea of building an online hobby magazine. In this last year, Adam has since released 6 amazing issues, packed full of hobby articles from your fellow hobbyists. You can check out my review of Issue 3 or Adam put together a special pack of the articles that I’m featured in, you can fill out the form below and download a teaser! Interview with Adam Jones of The Golden D6 Tell us a bit about your hobby? The Golden D6 used to be my regular gaming group and we’d meet on a weekly-ish basis to get out Warhammer 40000 on. At the time, the Melbourne 40K tournament scene was a vivid …

How to paint white skin and faces

How to Paint Light Skin – Broken Paintbrush Tutorial

Published by Joe B

Painting skin, particularly faces can be a challenge for beginner painters. Or even those, like me, who have been painting for years but never ‘got’ how to paint flesh. To learn, I challenged myself to create a tutorial on how to paint light skin. Much of this came out of creating a painting tutorial for each of the Mansions of Madness models. I’ve already done the tutorial for the dark skin models, so now it’s only fair to do the same for the light shades of skin. Below you will see I took five bare heads and tried slightly different techniques on each. From fast and dirty dry brush to only using washes to trying to do something more ‘advanced.’ Paint List Below are the paints I used for all five faces.ost of the colors came from Vallejo’s Skin Colors Set that I would highly recommend picking up. Game Color Heavy Skintone Model Color Sunny Skintone Model Color Basic Skintone Games Workshop Reikland Fleshshade Game Color Flesh Wash Game Color Red Wash Model Color Brown …