Painting the Klingons

I’m a pretty novice printer.  What I’ve learned about printing I’ve gotten from youtube. That said I am pretty satisfied with how my latest klingon ships have come out.

After Priming and mounting I started with the base coat.  I use Apple Barrel, walmart, Acrylic paints seem to work best with Shapeways miniatures.

One rule I picked up from youtube is to never put paint straight on a surface. I always have a a watered brush with a watered down portion of paint.  Painting in this way limits mistakes and allows details that could be easily obscured by heavy amounts of paints.

I started with the base coat of English Ivy Green and a moist #4 Flat brush.  Doing my best to cover the whole model but not super concerned if I miss an area, I brushed on the paint.  After the initial pass of the green paint I added additional watered down coats until the model is sufficiently covered.

My painting philosophy is that table quality miniatures need no more than three colors of paint on them.  For these klingons this means red, “Real Red”, gray”Dark Granite”, and light gray “Dolphin Gray”. I applied the red to the nacelles and impulse drives and visible deflectors,  gray for the Matter/Antimatter reaction systems of the Vor’Cha cruisers and the Impulse Coils of the K’Vort Birds of Prey. Finally light gray for smaller details and lighted windows.

All in all the thing I try to remember is that these miniatures are for playing not display quality  so that accuracy is not a huge deal.