how many coats is ok?

[Bastetcat]

I am trying to paint a demon princess my husband converted for me. She is gorgeous, and I want to do her justice.

The problem is she is largely nekkid, and I\'m having a devil of a time getting the skin tone right. I keep hearing over and over that many thin coats is better than a few thick, and that\'s what I\'ve been trying to do. But how many coats is too many? I started trying to do some underpainting on her - that ended up looking horrible, so I\'m tried to paint over my mistakes. I\'m up to at least 8 and I have many more to go to get a smooth look. But at some point, won\'t I start to lose detail?

She has lots of custom green stuff that I\'m afraid will be destroyed if we try to remove the paint and start over.

 

[Ritual]

If you\'ve kept your paint thin all along, you could have quite many layers without loosing detail or get a rough surface. Once you\'ve got a smooth base coat, the highlights can be made with even thinner paint.

 

[cadboy]

if the paint is thin enough.....

i agree with ritual, i find that if the paints are thin enough, you really can keep going and going. the only time i\'ve even had a rough surface doing this is when my air conditioning shut off during the summer [good ol 2003 all of easten north america power outage] and my paints dried up faster on my brush than i was used to.
what i\'ve always done, if you have the patience for it, is to skip the whole primer/base coat thing, and just start with a thin version of a colour that will be applied directly to the area instead of using black or white. usually i\'ll stick to the dark end of the spectrum as it covers naked plastics easier. i\'ve never had a problem with metals using this technique.
the only problem i\'ve ever found is painting white - i\'ve always had to base spray white on plastics.

 

[Trevor]

You can do many many coats.

One thing you can do is some glazes. Get some of your darker flesh colour, or an appropriate flesh coloured wash (you can use red and brown inks mixed together).
Then you need Vallejos glaze medium (or equivalent).

Mix the flesh colour with the glaze medium (somewhere from 60:40 to 50:50 ratio). Then add a heap of water, at least 2x as much as the volume of flesh. Then wash this over the skin. The key here is to keep the wash very very dilute, it will probably look like its not having much effect, but it will help smooth the layers together.

make sure you let it dry completely before continuing. You can add multiple glazes, either on top of each other or between layers to tie the colours together.

Hope this helps.

 

[Bastetcat]

Originally posted by Trevor

One thing you can do is some glazes....
Then you need Vallejos glaze medium (or equivalent).

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the suggestions! What exactly is the glaze medium? (so I can look around for an equivalent). I recently bought some Liquitex flow improver and have started working with it...still need a LOT of practice with it, I think!

 

[Trevor]

Its a bit like flow improver and retarder in one. The flow improver will probably work the same, but test on an old mini first.

The vallejo stuff is really good, because it does multiple things at once, depending upon how much you use and how much water you add, if you can get some I highly recommend it.

 

[Ritual]

The liquitex flow improver is great. Put one drop of flow improver for each 15-20 drops of water. Mix it in an empty pot or something and use it instead of water to thin your paints. You can combine it with liquitex slo-dri retarder if you want to extend the drying time of your paints.

 

[Bastetcat]

Originally posted by Ritual
The liquitex flow improver is great. Put one drop of flow improver for each 15-20 drops of water. Mix it in an empty pot or something and use it instead of water to thin your paints. You can combine it with liquitex slo-dri retarder if you want to extend the drying time of your paints.

I have a special pot now dedicated to the flow improver. I\"m pretty much not using plain water any more. I think it\'s helping - I\'ll post pics as soon as these are done, but that might be a while!

Just got some of the retarder and was thinking of combining them - is this combo similar to the Vallejo glaze? (I don\'t know of any shops around here that sell Vallejo - I know I can get it online but since I already have the other two....)

Thanks for the advice guys!

 

[Trevor]

I\'m guessing yes, probably. Just use a tiny bit of the retarder though.