Adventures in Miniature Painting #4

If you've been following along at home with the last twothree installments, this is where it gets a little crazy.  (part the first, part the second, part the third)

Like I mentioned before, miniature painting is a stupidly deep hobby and it's super easy to get lost in the details if you let yourself.  If you're like me, you like the idea of mastery, but let's just accept that unless you're some kind of mini painting wunderkind, you aren't going to be cranking out stuff like this or this or this if you've started recently.  That said, here's some stuff I found helpful and finally we're going to talk about gear.

Online Instruction

I walked you through a simple value sketch and glaze thing.  I cribbed that from Vince Venturella and I'm not gonna lie, it's what got me over the hill of finishing my first fig.  He uses it for speed painting; I use it for just about everything.  If you didn't follow the link in the previous post, here it is again.  Don't worry, I'll wait.  The same techniques can be used for all kinds of advanced stuff, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.  Vince has a series called Hobby Cheating which I found super extra duper helpful when starting.  If some of the crap I've written here sounds similar to what Vince says, well, that shouldn't be a surprise.  Also, bejangles is just a fun word.

If you're coming at mini painting from the table top crafting world, you probably already know about Jeremy at  Black Magic Craft.  If so, you probably already know about his  series on mini painting.  His recommendations are all solid IMO.  And if you don't know about BMC, his terrain is killer and it's worth it to watch a few of his videos.  We came at minis from opposite directions.  He started with terrain and craft paints and got into minis later.  I learned to paint on minis and eventually (begrudgingly) got into terrain building later which is probably why I hate craft paints so much.  

Miniac runs a damned good youtube channel about painting.  Like Vince, he's a high end painter and his stuff is often tilted to that side of things.  His tutorials and explorations tend to be structured and he also, occasionally, does some actual science.  His treatment of non-metallic metals is awfully good.  And if you need just one more, I'd throw in Next Level Painting.  Kenny's tutorials are all over the board but his results are awfully good.  Not coincidentally, all of these folks use airbrushes (more below). 

These (obviously) aren't the only channels out there, but they're a pretty good starting point for new painters.  There's also (obviously) a pretty big reddit community around mini painting but you probably already guessed that.  If you aren't used to being critical of your own work and want to improve, look for folks who can give you constructive feedback on your painting.

Airbrush

I agonized over buying an airbrush.  I don't like unitaskers.  Folks told me that they're fiddly, cantankerous, hateful things that make a bunch of stuff way easier if you can get them to work correctly but they almost never work correctly.  And you have to clean them religiously.  And sometimes they still won't work.  I ended up buying literally the cheapest combo kit (airbrush+compressor) I could find on Amazon.  You can buy cheaper ones today.  I justified this by being lousy at rattle can priming/highlighting and living in a state that rains a lot.

Did it work out?  Kind of.  It is a fiddly, cantankerous, hateful thing.  It likes to not work and it's really easy to break it and if you're not careful you'll get it in a mode where it'll be a pain to deal with.  To get around this, I clean mine obsessively and I thin my paints probably too much.  Cleaning the beast is not for the faint of heart but it isn't that bad if you only have to do it once or twice per session.  

That said, I think it is hands down the best way to prime figs and apply a zenithal highlight unless you are a rattle can maestro (I am not).  Right now it suits my needs and while it keeps working (knock on wood) I'm happy I have it.  Once, I even put several ounces of black crappy craft paint through it to black bomb some dungeon tiles.  It was a mess, but it worked.  I'm slowly using it for more and more tasks, some of them not painting.  See, it's not a unitasker!  I will most likely buy a nicer one in the not so distant future.

Once you get going and if you're serious about painting, I do recommend buying one.  I do think buying a cheaper one is the best choice unless you're willing to be ultra careful.  They are fiddly and you will likely break it or lose a tiny, tiny key part, or bend the awfully thin and painfully sharp needle.  Breaking my $20 Master's is far less painful than breaking, say, a $300 Iwata.  It's your money--spend it how you like.

Brushes

The great brush debates have raged for countless aeons...or maybe several score years which is about how long mini painting as we know it has been a thing.  Do you need a fancy expensive endangered Russian grizzly weasel hair brush?  Lots of pro painters use super cheap synthetic brushes and lots of pro painters use fancy weasel hair brushes too so that's no help.  Which is best?  You're going to have to figure that out for yourself, I'm afraid, but first I'll tell you a cautionary tale of woe and despair.

I struggled with cheap brushes that I didn't like for far, far too long and it negatively affected my enjoyment of the hobby.  My fits and starts with mini painting over the years weren't super positive so when I picked it up again Fo' Realz(TM) last summer, I didn't really want to invest a lot in gear.   I wasn't sure I was going to like it any more than I did the last N times and it felt more like a thing I had to do more than something I wanted to do.  I'd already dropped good money on the paint starter kit and I wasn't super ready to put more money down.

I bought cheap synthetic brushes in 2014, golden taklons on someone's recommendation.  I pretty much destroyed them in a couple weeks.  This made me super worried about dropping $25 on a Kolinksy Sable if I was going to destroy that in a small number of weeks too.  So I bought slightly less cheap and slightly fancier brushes.  These were supposed to be natural red sable, one step less endangered and one step less expensive than Russian grizzly weasels.  They were actually synthetic and I pretty much destroyed those in a few weeks too.  Damnit.

Mostly out of desperation, I bought 4 each of Princeton Siberia Series 7000 size 4 and Blick Masterstroke size 4 from Blick's online store to get over their "free shipping" threshold.  Both of those brushes have been awesome and both were under $8 each.  I really, really like using them and they aren't super spendy.  They hold a tip well, they aren't extra floppy, but they're also not stiff like most synthetics.  Outside of stuff like painting terrain, applying washes, super fine detail work, and dry brushing, I pretty much use these all the time.  So, do you need a fancy expensive brush?  Shit, man, I don't know you, but it made a big difference for me.

Paints

My starter kit was the older version of this one from Army Painter.  I think it's a fine kit to learn on and a not super expensive way to build up a collection of paints.  There are a few colors I really like (Oak Brown, Angel Green, Dragon Red) and a lot more colors I don't like (all of their metallics, any of the yellows and just about anything light).  Their quickshades are awesome, but you can buy those separately.

Army Painter paints have a couple...er...attributes worth noting.  First, they are stupidly hard to shake well enough to mix because when properly mixed they are quite thick.  Mine are almost always separated, though I did buy them like five years ago.  I've taken to dropping stainless steel ball bearings into each dropper to help mix and they're still hard to shake well enough.  Second, if you work with glazes like I do, you have to be super extra careful not to over-thin them.  At best they'll go glossy which is usually not what I want.  At worst they stop being paint and aren't usable and the ratio to non-paint is not consistent across colors.  Last, and I think the worst part, is that quality seems to be all over the board.  I've found the colors I like and I tend to use those a lot.  Everything else feels like it's just taking up space.

...and then I bought an airbrush.  Army Painter paints do not like being forced through airbrushes.  While not as bad as crappy craft paints in this department, I do not recommend using these in this way.  So I had to buy new paints.  Vallejo's Game Air and Model Air lines are made for airbrushes, and no, I have no idea what the difference is.  Better yet, you can use them with a not-airbrush and because they're thinned enough to go through an airbrush, you don't need to thin them.  These are higher quality than the Army Painter paints for the most part and I'm probably going to replace my existing paints with Vallejo as I progress.  While not meant for airbrushes, I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention Vallejo's inks which I like a lot.  The normal blue (azul) is probably my favorite color of any paint I own.  Vince has a really good breakdown of different paints by brand if you're interested.

I also bought two packs of Badger Minitaire paints mostly because Vince talked about them.  Badger makes airbrushes so, naturally, these are airbrush paints.  The pigment is super fine, so fine, in fact, that it's often hard to get them to mix properly.  Luckily, the ball-bearing trick works for these too, so I got that goin' for me.  Their color line is a lot more limited than Vallejo's and like the model air/game air paints, I sometimes use these with a paint brush.  The two sets I got were their normal paint line and their ghost tints which will require their own paragraph.

I think ghost tints are washes, and can be used for really sweet effects.  They are fairly thin and go on with a light gloss.  I haven't used them all but I have loved the handful I've used.  Just for fun I once put a light coat of plasma fluid on a select area  of a mostly-metallic figure I was finishing.  The effect was so nice that I slapped it over most of the metallics on the figure.  Another anecdote?  Sure.  I was looking for a nice red effect to stick in a gnoll's yodeling mouth.  Have I mentioned how much I love gnolls?  In putting a drop of "fresh blood" on my old home-made wet palette (more in a bit) I accidentally dropped a bit on my cutting board.  It dried pretty quickly as acrylics tend to do and when I noticed it, I immediately started to look for where I'd cut myself--it was that convincing.

Wet Palette

People like to say that a wet palette will improve your painting more than almost anything else.  I don't know if that's true.  I do know that it improved mine and even better than that, it made me stop worrying about wasting drops of paint I only used three or four brushstrokes out of.  We've all got our own neuroses.

Most mini paints benefit from being thinned.  Remember that we want very thin coats so we don't cover up detail.  A wet palette will help with this by osmosing water into the paint over time.  If you use a container that has a seal (and you should) you can close the lid when you're done and the paint will keep for a few days.  Save money!  Paint better!  It's a win-win!  But it's better than that!  You can build your own!

You can find all kinds of tutorials for building these on the cheap.  I started here.  In fact, I built multiple of them.  I started with a container like this (it was like $4 and came with lunchmeat in it--good for holding all kinds of hobbying).  I then stuck a couple kitchen sponges in the bottom, cut a square of parchment paper (these have a grid for easy cutting), poured some water in the bottom and started painting.  I switched to a larger, shallower tupperware with a piece of sponge cloth cut to shape before I put money down for a Sta-Wet.  Note:  if you hate super goopy craft paints half as much as I do, the same trick can semi-hydrate them to approximate something usable.

Why did I buy what I already had?  I got super tired of reaching up and into the container to get at the paint.  This is made doubly bad by being terrifically nearsighted and not being able to paint with my glasses on.  On the upside, it's a significant magnification from "normal".  After about two months, I got real tired of bumping my brushes on the edge of the container.  The Sta-Wet is super shallow and cost me $10.  Seemed like a win.  Note:  the paper it came with isn't for mini-paints.  Use parchment paper instead.

I had one problem that sucked with the Sta-Wet.  Other than quite often poking through the parchment and spilling paint into the sponge, the sponge also tends to gather mold.  This makes it smell funny and will eventually start to look funny.  Sometimes it's just paint.  I started trying to resolve it with flow improver which I think is a mind anti-bacterial.  I never tried dish soap because I hadn't thought of it until just now.  My solution?  A few bits of copper.  Note that we think of modern pennies as being copper but they're mostly made of zinc.  I had some heavy gauge wire which I stripped, curled up and stuck in each corner and I haven't had a mold problem since.  Note that some paints smell funny all on their own.

Handling Devices

I super recommend having a handle to hold your fig as you paint it.  Doing so prevents some paint from ending up on your hands, helps prevent hand cramps, and might just keep your fig from winding up on the carpet.  Minis and paints are cheap, but carpets, sadly, are not.  Also, it's really lousy to pull carpet fibers off of partially dried paint.

Lots of people have said lots of things like using dowels, blocks, corks, bottles, and other random things.  I used empty foil roll cut to length with cardboard squares hot glued to both sides containing a few pennies for weight.  They worked...ok.  You could spend like $8 on a Games Workshop thing if you really want to, but if you haven't already figured it out, I'm cheap.  If you saw the previous post, you already know that I use empty spice jars.  They cost about $7, have a good weight, fit well in a hand, and come with spices in them.  A wad of blu tack secures the mini during painting and away you go.  I've got a collection of about a dozen of these with more on the way which is handy for batch painting.

Fin?

Interspersed with stuff I picked up from other people in this almost-series is some practical crap and experience I picked up all on my own.  This post pretty much exhausts these learnings so this might be the last of the long-form posts containing practical stuff for a while.  This is my way of giving back to the folks who helped me out on the journey.  Hopefully someone out there will find something helpful here too.  

Adventures in Miniature Painting #3

That's right, I split the painting part from the prep part in much the same way you wouldn't do a party.  It was too long as a single post and now I get to ++ my post count.  You can't stop me!

Miss part 2?  It's here!  Part 4 continues here!

Glazing

Brown shows through better where the drybrush left paint.
Recesses are still dark but we'll darken them again later.

OK so we now have a pretty reasonable value sketch so we can go about putting color down.  We want to pick our colors and thin them down to make a glaze.  If we thin them down too much, they stop being paint.  We want something slightly heavier than the wash.  Depending on the paint, I'm looking at 1 part paint to 2 or 3 parts water but glaze medium is far better (this is what it's for).  You'll need to mess around with this but you basically want paint that goes on translucent.  If you want to move the color more, put on another coat once it's dry but know that the more pigment you get on there the less of your lighting will show through.  I aim for two or three layers because I don't trust my mixing to get it in one.  You can always add more paint but taking paint away is really hard.

We aren't moving the color much with each coat.
Left:  3 coats, right:  1 coat

When you're putting the paint down, you're going to want to not load your nice hopefully pointy brush too heavily.  Paint should not be dripping off of it.  You want to put the paint down in a controlled manner.  I keep a folded paper towel to wick paint off my brush to make sure I don't get too much to work with.  I don't use it all the time; only when I've been too pushy with my paint puddle.  Some people will wipe the excess off on the thumb holding the mini.  The important thing is to get the paint where you want it and only where you want it.  Paint shouldn't pool in the dark recesses, but unless you're using a light color (like I did) it doesn't matter much if you do.  Aim for smooth strokes with the brush pulling the hairs where you want them on the fig.  Stabbing with the brush (called stippling by paint-y types) isn't what we should be doing.

I generally work interior to exterior.  That usually means starting with fleshtones and ending with weapons and equipment.  For these dudes it was dark fur, light fur, then armor.  I will sometimes start with super hard to get at places with my brush if I think it's going to be a problem because I know it's going to be messy.  For this particular thing, if I make a mess on an area I'm already happy with, I will quickly get an extra brush, get some water on it, then take care of the issue before it dries.  You can sometimes paint over it, but it depends on what it is.

Also, it'd be remiss of me to not mention that you'll be painting away, finish a color then take a look and thing "holy carp, I've ruined it!"  No you haven't.  Most minis go through a phase that looks bad.  I have no idea why.  I've learned that unless I can pinpoint what's wrong at which point corrective measures are usually obvious, I just need to power through.  I find that the more I paint the more true this becomes.

Details

My crappy shot washed out the subtleties of the shading
on these guys.  They look much better in person.

This is where I pick out a bunch of the fun details and where the mini starts looking done.  Depending on how I feel, I'll do eyes first with whatever touch ups are needed.  This is what the sharp brush is for.  Note:  I always paint eyes.  This is Vince's doing.  If you paint eyes all the time you'll get used to painting them and eventually it won't be a chore.  I'll also note that you can give your figs a heck of a lot more character if you paint eyes well.  Eyes won't save an otherwise lousy paint job but badly painted eyes will ruin an otherwise good paint job.  Human types are really good at picking up incredibly minute issues with eyes so getting good at painting them will pay off in the long run.

This is also where I do weapons, armor and other metallics.  If I'm going fast I usually just paint with full strength or slightly thinned metallics.  I haven't found a metallic that glazes well but I'm also not a professional painter.  You don't need to overthink it at this point (that'll come later).  This is usually where I sort out other details like bags, bandages, leather straps, bejangles or earrings or whatever.

And while we're talking about metallics, the good news is that our bang per buck ratio goes up if the fig is wearing chain mail or scale mail or something like that.  As it turns out, we've already got all the technique we need to quickly paint these without much trouble.  Start with a dark metallic like gunmetal or something.  Hit it with a dark wash (gloss would be best here).  Then finish it off with a light drybrush of a lighter metallic.  It's like 5 minutes of work and looks like you spent a heck of a lot more time.

One More Wash

The last wash re-darkened the recesses.

Now we want to re-darken all the places we messed up with our glazes.  We can't be messy with this one:  get the paint only were you want it and (generally) only in the places you want to darken.  If you're heavy with this wash, you'll get coffee staining which is cool if that's what you want, but we usually don't want it.  If you're not opposed to spending money, I super recommend Agrax Earthshade and Nuln Oil from Citadel (special mention:  Reikland Fleshshade).  People call them liquid talent.  I don't think this is overstated.  I use one or both of these on just about every build.

Often your models will look dirty if you finish with a wash.  Obviously, this is OK for the gnolls but sometimes less so for other characters.  I will sometimes drybrush over the top, but if you do that it will sometimes look chalky--light colors seem to be more prone to this than others.  Occasionally I will put normal paint over the top, usually the color I glazed with.  That will usually solve it but you have to be extra special careful to not get paint in the recesses otherwise your wash was for naught.

Further Reading Watching

Vince has a really good explanation of this whole process here where he's painting his hand gunners.  It's a long video full of all kinds of good stuff, but the first ~40 minutes is what we want to focus on.  He's using this technique to speed paint, but this is where I started with to do any paint.  I think this is a heck of a lot easier to start with than the normal "gajillions of layers" approach.  You don't need to know how light works to get a decent result and you don't have to sweat a lot of details other than getting the techniques down and those aren't all that hard.  Seems like a win-win to me.

Fierce!

The dirty secret of miniature painting is that you don't actually need any artistic ability to get figs to a reasonable table top level of quality.  You do need steady hands, though, a few techniques briefly outlined here, and a little bit of patience.  The two gnolls shown there took a grand total of under five hours which isn't all that bad for two figs.

Like all hobby endeavors, you can take this one deep--really deep.  How far you take it is up to you but remember that no one is forcing you to paint in any particular way or to any particular standard.  If you're like me and only really care about getting figs on a table (sometimes call "tabletop standard" or "3 feet fabulous") then you don't need to get too deep or labor over a single fig for weeks on end.  They're your figs.

And We're Done!

Congrats!  You've painted your first mini!  Now what?  Let it dry and impress your friends!  In the next installment of this rarely updated almost-series, we'll talk about other newbie-friendly advice and my experiences spending far too much cashmoney on far too crappy gear.  Stay tuned!

Adventures in Miniature Painting #2

Maybe you're a wargamer who wants to take up the Fight Against the Grey(TM).  Maybe you're like me and get tired of pushing around unpainted figs all the time.  Maybe you just like hobby stuffs--I don't know, I don't know you.  Maybe you just want to learn from my mistakes.  That I can help with.  Buckle in, kids, cuz it's a long way to Texas.  In fact, I've had to split this post into two.  It's that far.  I used to live there, I should know. 

• The goal is to get paint on figs that:
• doesn't make you unhappy 
• is fit for tabletop use
• The razor we will pursue is:
• learn the bare minimum number of things
• spend the least time and cashmoneys to get there 

There's a metric ass load of content on the interwebs including quite a large number of tutorials on the youtoobs.  It is super easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of stuff to learn and all the totally awesome photos that people post.  All that stuff has value but not right now--we're just starting.

Note:  we're not going to talk about gear in depth here (maybe later) but the completionist in me insists that I give what I think is a minimum list anyway:

• One large-ish brush (size 3 or size 4 in most lines), bonus if it holds a point.  It should be bigger than you think is reasonable for painting a mini.
• One small-ish brush (size 0 or 1) which needs to hold a point for detailing.  If you can count the hairs on the brush it's probably too small.  
• One flat or blunt brush 1/2 inch or so that you don't mind destroying
• Your paints (mini paints are better than craft paints)
• One or more minis to paint (not going to get far without these)
• Something to put your paints on before you start painting.  This could be a floor tile, a piece of wax or parchment paper, or a plastic cutting board.  
• Water (hopefully available from your local tap) and something to put it in.  I recommend using a cup you won't drink from (mine is a mug with a wicket chip where I'd drink).
• Paints.  This guy gets you most of the way for $30.  I have the older version of this guy for around $100.  If you want a real analysis, Miniac and pal's got you covered.
• [optional?] A hobby knife like an X-ACTO or something.  
• [optional?] If your mini requires assembly, you'll want super glue or something.

It Begins!

These two gnolls (I love gnolls) came in the same blister pack so you get to see two miniatures painted for the price of...well, free.  These are pre-primed Pathfinder Battles Deep Cuts Gnolls.  I paid under $5 for the both them.  These are primed in white which I generally like for what's about to happen.  

Oh man, gnolls!

If you're new to mini collecting, I like the plastic lines like these.  The common ones are Reaper Bones, WizKids Nolzur's Magnificant Unpainted Miniatures and Pathfinder Battles Deep Cuts.  They tend to be affordable, good quality, and usually come multiple per pack.  The WizKids lines above are licensed which means if you're playing that game and you want an official mini, that's your best starting point.  If instead, you need a large number of the same things, say, gnolls, or just want a pile of mooks, do what the wargamers do.  Frostgrave is an interesting skirmish game with its own line of figs.  Their awesome box sets contain 20 figs and cost around $35 (assembly required).  And yes, they have gnolls.  You want knights?  Perry Miniatures has got you covered.  There are many options if you're trying to build up a collection on a budget.

Hated, Hated Mold Lines

Mold lines are the bits of the casting medium that gets stuck between the two sides of mold.  You can sand them off or scrape them off with the back of a hobby knife.  We aren't spending money on tools yet, and you super don't need it, but I do very much like this one.  (And no, I don't get kickbacks for any of this stuff.)  Failure to remove these now will mean your mini will look less like the awesome thing it's supposed to be and more like the plastic or metal toy it is.  It bothers me so I deal with them but it isn't strictly necessary.  Feel free to skip if you're OK with that or don't have easy access to the right tools or something--it's OK, I give you permission.

Note:  if you're starting with a white primed mini like I am, or a Reaper Bones or something, mold lines are sometimes really, really hard to spot.

Gotta Wash That Sucker

Unless you have a fancy "already primed" mini like I do, you will need to wash and prime it.  All minis come out of the molds with traces of a mold release agent which prevents them from sticking to the molds they're, er, molded in and which is also really good at preventing paint from sticking.  You gotta wash that off with soapy water.  I use an old toothbrush and hated dish detergent (the hand wash stuff, not the stuff that goes in the dishwasher).  This is doubly true if you, like me, played with your minis on the table and they're covered in BBQ grease and Cheetos dust.  I'm not here to judge.

A Primer on Primer

I'm certain no one's made this joke before.  A primer is a paint that sticks to your mini and sticks to your paint.  It's good stuff.  The one I like is Vallejo Surface Primer, this one's in Panzer Grey.  You can brush it on (thinly, please) and it'll dry in a few minutes.  You probably don't want to prime in black despite what most folks might tell you.  Priming in black makes a lot of stuff harder and it makes what we're about to do here way less effective.

If you're really opposed to priming, you can sometimes get away without priming some minis.  My first Reaper Bones weren't primed and while the paint does kind of stick to it, it just doesn't stick very well and I know I'm going to have to repaint them at some point.  To add to to the debacle, I also didn't wash them because I was lazy.

A Value What?

What we're about to do is called a value sketch.  This is a simple accounting of how light interacts with the model with an emphasis on highlighting details on the model.  Since all lighting is basically baked into a mini, you can think of this as vertex lighting if your mini was a polygonal model.  Onto that we're going to add our texture data (colors) while preserving as much of the vertex lighting as possible.  To accomplish this, we'll be using a number of thin glazes.  If you know photography and not graphics programming, you can think of a glaze as a gel on your light applied very specifically to your target.  We'll choose to cover over some of the lighting info we're about to put on with stuff like metallic paints but we're not there yet.

We apply a value sketch in two easy steps:

1. Apply a dark wash over the mini to darken the recesses.
2. Apply a light drybrush over the mini to lighten the high areas.  

Note:  dark washes usually dry lighter than they start.

A wash is paint thinned down to the point that it's a) very translucent, and b) very thin.  You can get fancy with them but for this particular application it doesn't have to be super precise.  One part black paint to like four parts water should work.  Note that how much not-paint you need will depend on your not-paint and your paint but you'll figure this out with time.  Sub one or two of those parts of water with thinner or flow improver if you have any--it'll help the paint stay paint.  Washes get into the deep areas of the fig and darken them as if in shadow.  We want to work it into all the nooks and crannies we'd fill with butter if it were an English muffin.

Slap your newly made wash all over your model with whatever brush you have handy but not super heavily and not your chunky brush--we need that guy for the next step.  You do not need to be super careful with this step, but you will need to wait for it to dry completely.  Sorry.  When it's done you should have a mini that's darker in the recesses than the primer color and is generally darker overall.  If you end up with too much wash on your fig, it'll dry in ugly stains.  This is less of a problem because we're about to cover some of it up, just slow your roll next time, OK?

One down, one to go!
These sculpts re really nice!

The next step is to apply a drybrush to add your vertex lighting.  Take your chunky brush you don't mind destroying (I use an eye shadow brush from the dollar store), get some light paint on it, like an off-white or actual white, then wipe most of it off on a piece of paper towel.  You want your brush to only be holding onto the barest traces of paint.  When I started, this seemed to me like a terrific waste of paint but it does work.  I got over it.  If you run it over your hand, it should pick out your skin texture but not intrude into the crevices.  If it does get into the crevices, you've got more wiping to do.

Now you want to very carefully bring the bristly end of the flat brush down across the mini.  Start gently to make sure that you don't have too much paint on it.  It should not streak or leave smudges.  It should only pick out the high points on the model and it will pop out all kinds of detail including every mold line you didn't deal with.  This is probably my favorite part of this technique because it's like a journey of discovery of all the bejangles and cool bits the modelers left for us to admire paint.

When you're applying your drybrush, you want to be super careful of two things:

1. Try to only have the brush touch the mini on the way down (we don't want to paint the undersides with the highlights)
2. Focus on the top area of the mini and anything exposed like protruding knees and exposed calves and maybe really big prominent boots

I used an old pot of Reaper "linen" from 2004.
That's the brush I used.  It cost a dollar.

If you do this correctly you'll be mimicking a top down light source.  Interior areas on the fig will be in shadow which will be mostly correct and lower areas, especially those on the underside of things will also be in shadow.  Note that protruding weapons and jangly bits are going to make this harder.  I find that archers in firing poses and folks holding weapons out with both hands (like the gnoll on the left) really muck this up but most folks won't notice.  When you're done you should have a pretty reasonable greyscale figure with recesses and undersides in darkness and stuff on the upper or exposed parts in extreme highlights.

If you set the fig down on the table, the lighting will hopefully look exaggerated but natural.  Note that we want to exaggerate the lighting because these figs are really small and real light doesn't interact with them the way we'd hope.  Otherwise we'd get away with a simple base coating and actual light will sort the rest of it out for us.  The universe doesn't like to cooperate, though.

Next time:  glazing and finishing touches.  I guess that'll be most of the actual painting as opposed to the prep (yes, I consider the first wash and value sketching as prep).

If you missed part 1, you can find it here and here's part 3 if you want more.