Basecoats

Now the real meat of miniature construction begins, with applying a basecoat. This can easily be the most time consuming aspect of painting the miniature, as well as the most tedious. It is important to plan what color scheme you wish to use beforehand, as you want the models to fit with the rest of your army. The most striking army to face is not a jumbled mess of colors, but a uniform color scheme that is followed throughout your entire military force.

When painting your basecoats, I highly recommend thinning your paints on the palette with a small amount of water. I simply place a blob of paint on the palette, and a drop of water from my glass near it. Then, touch your brush to the water for a split second, and mix it with your paint. It takes practice to achieve the perfect consistency, but you will quickly learn when you have too much water, or too little. I do not recommend mixing your paint within the bottle itself, as you will often need varying consistencies when painting. Use a medium brush if possible, and apply the paint in long, smooth, purposeful strokes, rather than quick and little ones with a detail brush. This helps the coat to stay smooth and keeps the paint from clumping. It is also important to rinse your brush every once and while even while working with the same color and especially between colors. Model paint dries quickly and can easily clump up in your brush, leaving hardened blobs on your coat of paint.

A basecoat should look something like this.

You may need to use a few coats when thinning your paints, but it helps to keep your models smooth looking and sleek. This is simply adding a dark red to the chassis of the suits, gold to their stabilizers and antennae, and bright red to their lenses. You do not need to go out of your way to add details until the highlighting and detail step, which we will cover next time.