Painting

How To Make A DIY Wet Palette

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A wet palette is a game-changing tool for miniature painting, especially when working with acrylics. It’s designed to keep your paints moist and workable for extended periods—hours, days, or even weeks—by using a moisture-retaining system that typically includes:

  • A sealed container
  • A layer of absorbent sponge
  • A sheet of semi-permeable paper on top

This setup allows water from the sponge to slowly pass through the paper, keeping the paint hydrated without diluting it too much. That means smoother blending, less paint waste, and more time to finesse your colors and details.

Here are some good instructions for making a wet palette.

Keeping Track Of Your Paint Schemes

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The Paint Machine blog, in a post on painting Landsknechts, has hidden a great tip on keepign track of your paint schemes: at each stage of the army, take a digital photo of the models and the paint used. That way, if you have to add figures, you have a record of what colors you used.

Restoring Dried Out Paint

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What wargamer has not had the frustration of finally getting time to sit down for a painting session, only to find that the paint is dried? While a completely dried-out paint is gone, the partially dried out ones can still be recovered. This video shows how.

Paint Remover

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So you messed up the paint job on an expensive miniature. Now you have to remove the paint without ruining the figure by turning the paint into an impossibly gooey mess. In the Two Hour Wargames group, Ken Hafner writes:

We have had good results with Castrol Super Clean, Tough Cleaner
Degreaser. It is found mostly in automotive sections of stores, and is in a deep purple bottle. I have used it on both metal and hard plastic
figures on plastic bases, with excellent results. It doesn’t harm the
plastic at all. I prime with spray paints, paint with acrylics, and over
coat with various dullcoats, including Testors and Krylon. It removes
them all with the aid of a toothbrush.

One caveat: be sure to use plastic gloves when you are scrubbing. It
is an EXCELLENT degreaser and will remove all natural oils from your
hands, and cause the skin to crack. We use it full strength.

How To Keep Paint On Plastic Figures

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Junior General has an article on how to solve one of miniature painting’s most intractable problems: getting paint to stick to plastic miniatures.