Catching Up:

I like my hobby shop. People walk in & email with interesting ideas and questions. I've been an artist all my life, and I don't know all the answers. I'm happy to share what I am familiar with, what works for me. And I'd like to thank everyone right now for thinking enough of my words and photography- the art I put into my website- to be reading this and asking me how I do this or that.

I've been asked what paint I like- for miniatures the Andrea & Vallejo acryl bottles are my favourite- rich shades, as intense as you want them to be, pleasant to work with. Nice range of mediums & topcoats too. In case you haven't tried a medium before, they come in dull and matte finishes, and what they are is a way to thin your paint without dilluting the rich color. They make a color more transparent so what is underneath shows through a little, like a candy apple car paint is transparent red over silver so you get that deep lustrous shine.

I should take a moment to apologize for these pages being so devoted to PinUp Girls, I'm kind of leaving my military modelers in the wind. Well the thing is I'm just not much into military. But the techniques here- they are universal to all types of painting. Where I'm doing sheer fabrics, the methods and materials translate directly to weathering heavy metal, and the dusty uniforms the men are wearing after a day in the field. I do keep a full line of Vallejo military colors, and they are accurate and gorgeous!

I guess the military modeler could skip the part about silks and nylons..... And then again maybe not :-)

I should also mention that I am not good with airbrushing the acryls. I know people who are, I know they work well, I just haven't the touch yet. Give me an old lacquer or enamel and I'm flying! I love the acryls, and they will not go glass hard ten years from now and chip off at the least bump, so I am determined to learn how to airbrush with them. But like the bartender said in Irma La Douce- That's another story.

So I do airbrush my old enamel primer because I like a perfectly smooth job of it, and the first skintone layer as well. Then it's hand-brush time, and I do think that a brush gives a more real 'feel' to clothing. And I do use the glazing mediums, having more experience with shading that way than with the airbrush. But I do love to see the work of an airbrush master, takes my breath away sometimes.

Okay, let's get to our benches:

The subject at hand is painting silk stockings. Actually I don't 'paint' them, I use pigment powder to dress her in nylons. I sell some pigment powders Tamiya packages for armor and train camouflage & weathering, and they come with a tiny sponge & brush for working them. But to be honest I use my little cups of eye-shadow, and the tiny sponge and brush that comes with them. Either one works fine.

So I start by painting the girls' legs as normal, complete with shading and modeling, as though she would not be wearing nylons. Now I have a 'real' leg to dress. Now all paint is just a slight bit porous, and any powder pigment can embed itself in the surface, the same way basement dust from your fingers can wreck a perfectly good paint job, so we cover our asses, and put a finish coat on her legs before we powder. A flat topcoat will have plenty of tooth and make a good surface, or if you want the nylons really sheer, go a satin or gloss topcoat. Gloss can always be scuffed a little with that thing you scrub kitchen pans with if it's too shiny.

Powder pigments WILL find a way to get where you don't want them, same as an airbrush WILL overspray, so masking what you don't want touched is brilliant:
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Modeling & Painting 3D Miniatures: Nylons, Sheers & Translucents
The Girls shown here are metal kits from
Andrea Miniatures in 80mm (1/22 scale).
They are app. 3 5/8" tall
Handy Girl shows an excellent job on her nylons, even at the tops where the fabric is thicker, and then thicker again, they still show the right transparency. I think I would have made the shadows on her knees and creases behind a little less so, but the highlight on her thigh is flawless, and the perfect sheen to say she's wearing leather sandals:
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Now we just find the right shade of powder and dust a bit on.

We have only dusted her, she is subject to handling now, so we spray the lightest coat of finish. Airbrush or spray can, if we use a hand brush we'll wreck the powder work. Airbrush suggested- A spray can will flow too much clear coat with too much force. But if you're real good with one, it can be done perfectly.

Nylons do reflect a bit of light, so I go a gloss topcoat, but it's got to be a VERY light coat, again so we don't wreck the powder work, and spray from a distance so it's already kind of drying when it lands, because we're not after glass-like shine. We can do another coat if we want after the first 'sealer' coat dries.

Todays' Interesting Question

was sent in about Magician Girl. The artist has done well with surface textures here, the photo contrast is a little flat, but I can still see a matte finish on her jacket, a gloss for her satin lapels and shoes, and looks like the right satin finish on the model herself. I might have emphasized the sheen on her nylons a little more, and wouldn't her garter belt be satin too?

And I'm pulling Vedette out of the hat because even though she's not wearing nylons, her knee, hip, and tummy shadows are perfection, and look close- her sheer body hug has highlights just where they should be, and the right sheen for the sheer fabric. Yes, I forgot to mention earlier that while we're working with transparent paint layers, it's a great time to do highlights & shadows too because it's the same thing- you want the skintone beneath to show through in varying degrees:

An actual 'hard-painted' shadow will make her look like Frankenstein in bad lighting! As modelers, we have literally hundreds of colors at our fingertips, and the temptation to buy more is often overwhelming. But the reality is that while most full time working artists have as much junk as we do- they do nearly ALL of their work with 30 colors or less. The rest are cluttering up a bench somewhere because they want to try them out in the spare time they never have. I think it's rather the same for us modelers.

It's this glazing thing. One layer of color 'thinned' with medium laid over another 'thinned' layer, and so on. That's why we really only need one good fleshtone, and 4 or 5 tints to go over it.

For clothing, yes find the closest shade there is to what you want in the finish. And then a few shadow tints to mix with the main color as you go- this is why I like to do clothing with a brush, so I can mix and tint and shadow alla prima. And then clothing can be glazed over the same as skintones until you get it just the way makes you happy.

One thing to remember is that sometimes a shadow is best done not by darkening a shade, but simply muting it, taking the sharpness or intensity out of it. A tiny amount of grey does this well. Or the shade directly opposite on your color wheel, like orange mutes blue, red mutes green, and so on.

Shadows are rarely shades of greys and blacks even though they may appear to be at first glance. Shadows have color too, the shadow areas are simply muted AND darkened. An over-extreme example of this is in the comic books we grew up with, or todays' Anime art- shadows are done with blues and purples from the 'cooler' side of the spectrum.

Translucence & Creating Depth:

Because they are our figures, this is our world, we can dress them as we please, and maybe they need jewelry. From How to Paint Fantasy Miniatures again, is a great method of creating translucent gems:
Here in 4 steps, an artist gives us a gem that we can 'look into'. My preferred method of doing this is to put a layer of glazing medium over the entire gem, and then add tiny drops of color at a time, swishing them around to where I want them. As the frame shows, the shadows must be added before the highlights. There is actually a fifth step the book doesn't show (but how could they), it's where you put a fairly thick layer of gloss finish on the gem, in fact that's whay really gives it depth like it's a drop of water, because the highlight is locked UNDER the actual surface, so you are truly looking into the stone.

Please note that all of my writing is only a guide of what works for me, or in some cases what I've seen work for others. These are not hard rules, it's not like you MUST do it my way, no, no, I live the ancient Greek philosophy myself- Bend the rules, push the envelope, try what everyone says won't work. I would even say that sometimes too much study is not a good thing. Better to build your model even if it has a few flaws from lack of experience than to have her sitting in a dark closet forever because you're so busy learning and trying to remember what you've studied you don't have time to build her.

And with that I'll say good-night to all, thanx for visiting my web, and Happy Modeling!!! Oh, good-night Vedette.....