Short tip: Use your own distilled water

If you live in a region like me where tap water can be pretty chalky you can have some problems with thinning your paints because the chalk and other minerals in your water can leave residues on your miniatures. Especially if you thin colors for your airbrush or mix your own glazes. If you are very unlucky it already can cause trouble when you use a wet palette, although I never experienced that before.

Yes, you can overcome this by using a glaze medium or specialized airbrush thinners, but these are somewhat expensive.
Or you switch to distilled water which is in most regions I know of pretty cheap.

But as you know me, I am always in the search for saving money so that I can spend it on more useful projects.
Therefore: if you have a tumbler which collects the water instead of blowing the hot air out, you can get your distilled water for free.

Maybe it is not chemically perfectly cleaned distilled water (I am not sure it is 100% cleaned of all minerals since for that you would have to boil the water) but at least it is WAY more "soft" as in less chalky than before.
Every tumbling will give you 1-2 liters of water, so it would be a waste of just pouring it into the sink. You can also use it if you have a steam iron or as addition to your window cleaner. Or even for your flowers, but then only if you fertilize because, as said, the minerals are already washed out.

But don't drink it! At least be careful with it, because it CAN cause issues because of the osmosis happening in our cells it can drain out too much of the potassium or sodium ions if you don't have a balanced diet.

Hope that tip was somewhat useful for you.


So long,
Paradox0n

Short tip: Care for your brushes!

Damaged brushes

Since I am into painting stuff again (the temperature isn't something around 40°C anymore) I have a really important tip for you guys out there: Care for your brushes!
I could throw four brushes away because they didn't keep their tip anymore. The first picture here shows what can happen if you don't care or just throw your brushes around. OK ok, those here are more than 10 years old by now, but if you paint a lot, this could happen much, much faster.

So my tip is: Give your brushes from time to time some love. Rinse them in clean water, then soap with whatever you have in your reach e.g. shampoo and rinse them again. After that, form a nice tip again and let the bristles dry (best with the tip down so that the water doesn't collect in the ferrule and weakens the glue).

Brush soap

If you want to go a step further, use some special brush soap. They come from different manufacturers. Mine was part of my DaVinci brush set but there is also a special one from "The Masters" which was a long time not so easily to buy in Germany. Only know that from videos on Youtube and everyone seems quite happy with it.

But whatever you do: Curd Soap, Shampoo, special Brush Soap... Show your brushes from time to time some love and clean them :)


So long,
Paradox0n

Short tip: Paint compatibility chart

Just a very short tip, because I see this question in lots of threads in painting forums or hobby related forums or even in tutorials and very very often it is something like: "I don't own this and that color what should I use?" or "I don't like this and that brand which color can I use to replace it?".

Maybe most of you already know but if not here is maybe an answer to questions like that: The Paint Range Compatibility Chart from DakkaDakka.
This chart is really helpful to get the matching tones from different brands. Even if they are not exactly the same, it really helps (I also used that one in the past).


So long,
Paradox0n

Hobby Basics - Gaming Tools

Its quite a long time since I wrote something for my Hobby Basics series. With my latest purchase I thought this would be a good time to do another article here, this time covering some of the tools you will need for war-gaming (my experiences are mostly for WHFB, KoW, Warmachine/Hordes and similar games). I have no experience in historical war games, but I don't think that they differ so much that my points will be invalid :)
I again warn you: Big chunks of text incoming! So be prepared if you follow me after the jump :)

Hobby Basics - Cleaning your stuff

Today I had a very frustrating moment (to be honest moments): Since the wheather here is REALLY bad I loaded my wet palette, got my miniatures I wanted to paint and switched some nice music on. Then I wanted to do the first brush strokes and BÄMM! One brush stuck together nearly to the point and the other brush divided itself into two nice halves... And worse to that, my airbrush completely stopped working and I had to disassemble it completely. And oh boy... it was nearly completely glued together (although I cleaned it after every usage like I described earlier). After calmly counting to 10 and taking some deep breathes I gritted my teeth and set to the task of cleaning my stuff. The brushes are my everyday brushes and its not really a loss if I can't rescue them but with the airbrush it is somehting completely different.

Lesson learned Number 1:  Keep your brushes in safety from your cats. Seems they found a new toy to play with on my desk and made things even worse...
Lesson learned Number 2: The Vallejo Primer I reviewed some time ago is a bit more sticky than normal paint and a normal blow out and cleaning isn't enough.

To see the positive in this disaster I thought on doing another Hobby Basic post on cleaning your stuff the advanced way :)

Hobby Basics - Wet Palette Tutorial

As many of you, I also use a wet palette for mixing and keeping my colors fresh. Inspired by Mr. Lees post about his way of doing it, I thought about making a "wet palette my way" post too. Et voila here we are. First of all: This is no rocket science, and I think most of you already know or use a wet palette these days. If not: Do it! Even if you are a beginners painter you will feel the difference between using a wet palette or just fetching your colors from a paint pot.
But I think everyone does it a little different and its best to experiment a bit with the stuff you have until you are satisfied and it really works for you.

Quick tips from Kris Belleau

I just wanted to share some nice quick tips recently posted from Miniwargaming.com. To be precise the Quick tips"-series from Kris Belleau. I collected all those free videos into one playlist. There are even more in the Wargaming-Vault but since I don't have access to that I just wanted to share and point out those nice videos.

Hope you enjoy it.


So long,
Paradox0n

Hobby Basics - Basing material | Part I

From time to time you will hear the question "Oh what do you use to do this and that on your bases?" or "Where can I find some stuff for basing my miniatures?". Therefore I thought of making a small list of the things I found work well with miniatures and what stuff I don't like.
And to be mentioned at the beginning: I will not talk about premade bases! This stuff is great but most of the time too expensive for big armies.

Today I will talk about the different basing materials I use especially the stuff you can get for free (or with very small costs):

Hobby tips - Cleaning your airbrush

As some tutorials in the web I read tried to tell me told how difficult the cleaning process of my airbrush should be and how it really isn't I thought a short article to sum up my experiences would be the best.

First of all: Cleaning your airbrush is neither complicated nor will it cost you much time. On the opposite! It should be part of your painting routine because it really makes the painting process much more comfortable.
If you ever opened your mouse to clean it.. Tadaaaa you can clean your airbrush too.

Hobby Basics - Glues

As promised I will do a complete series of Hobby Basics and here comes the next part, this time I will talk about glues. Every now and then you read on the tabletop forums questions about which glue is the best and what do you use for terrain and so on and so on. Since there is a broad selection on the market and you can nearly buy one glue for one task, this is now a jungle where you can get lost. That's why I will talk a bit about the glues that work for me.

White/Wood/PVA glue

The classics for terrain or base making. I have different kinds of white glue because I like to have different levels of thinning and don't want to mix this stuff everytime I use it. I have a roughly thinned one in my bottle which I use mostly for basing. I like the flow on smaller areas and how you can spread it with a brush. Then I have a big bucket with only some drops of water in it. This I use for terrain making like on my modular gaming board. Through its thickness the basing material sticks much better to the surface which is needed for played terrain (with bases this would only cause the miniature to "sink" into the sand).
As you can see I only use white glue from sone well known manufacturers. I tried out some cheap stuff from the one euro/dollar store but this stuff is even more diluted than my selfmade micture. Which means this is total crap. Perhaps you are lucky and get some better stuff but for me this will not be an option anymore.

White/Wood/PVA glue in different sizes

Hobby Basics - Tools

"Oh nooooooes, another boring of these: use this and that tool! babbling" you may think now. But as not all my readers and hobbiest in general are pros and have years of experience in miniature painting or terrain crafting, I will do a short(?) series of the tools I (!) use. I will give no advices to buy this or that, I will just give a statements of the experiences I made (or make) with the mentioned tools.. Hope you will like it though.

Pliers 

Often needed and a long time not in my toolbox: Pliers! I don't use any fancy and expansive pliers. I bought a small set of fine mechanics pliers in the hardware store and am pretty happy with them. I didn't want one for all, I wanted one for cutting out the miniatures from sprues, one for bending miniatures, wire and so on. I think they went over the tray for arround 6€ so not really expensive and something I couldn't hardly go wrong with.

A set of small pliers