Painting Tips from an Ex-'Eavy Metal & Award Painter

This week we asked our new designer to provide some Painting tips thanks to his time as an Award winning 'Eavy Metal Painter. Here is what David had to say.

1. Neatness, before you try out more difficult techniques concentrate on staying neat, brush control is really important and keeping neat edge highlights and blocked out areas is good practice. Don't worry about getting paint on other areas when base coating you're going to be painting those areas again later anyway. Also, a good Daylight lamp will really help you work on your neatness. 

2. Don't be tempted to repaint a finished figure, yes there are always things that you're not happy with but that's good, learn from it and move on, keep improving and don't get frustrated with a few mistakes. 

3. Practice, yeah sounds obvious but practise even when you don't really want to, it takes a bit of sacrifice to get good at things! As they always say practice makes perfect. Take your time and always aim to do your best work even if you are not sure, just do it and try different techniques and styles. 

4. Thin your paint, using thinner paint will give you a better finish, every paint colour and paint manufacturer is different and will take different amounts to thin so experiment a bit. But for base coating, you want to be applying 3-4 coats to get a smooth even finish. 

Sometimes thicker paint is required as you need to control the flow more for details and edge highlights. It's all about control and finish, adapt the viscosity of the paint to what you need and the look you want to achieve

5. Compare! People often tell me they don't compare themselves to good painters because it puts them off, well that won't help you improve, look at and copy good neat painters ('Eavy metal paint jobs are the best as they are always going to be neat and well executed).

We hope these helped you and if you have any questions or other tips don't hesitate to comment below.