OMG I did it! I actually painted some ships!

I needed to find some way to avoid interacting with people on the family holiday, so I decided to paint some ships. I got some paint from a FLGS and (with a very basic idea of what scheme I wanted) I went on holiday. Soon, I had results!

http://imgur.com/a/6OgGR - full album (10 images)

My paint scheme for the fleet will be grey basecoat (Citadel's Mechanicus Standard Grey spray) with green highlights. Without further ado...

These images might be a bit big

The X wing was the first to be painted (none of them have engines or cockpits yet, that will be coming soon hopefully) and I was very happy with the coverage on the spray, and Nuln Oil (gloss brought out a bit of the design that you couldn't see with the base. A bit of masking tape made stripes easy to do, but there was some bleeding on the edges of one wing. The highlights also worked nicely and I'm pretty pleased with the end result. After that was the A wing, and although the stripes worked better, I messed up a bit with the highlights. It's not too noticeable on the table but I can't avoid looking :/ Now we get the B wing, which I wanted to do differently. I like the sharp edges it gives to the B wing, and gives it much more of a 'blade' look. A few small errors with highlight direction but not too much of a problem.

And there we have it!

Any tips/criticism you have would be greatly appreciated

I'd say you are of to a great start! The markings on the X-Wing came out very clear, thats great work. Also love how you improved on your highlighting going to the B-Wing. Its a simple and effective color scheme, too, good choice!

What you need to practice, I believe, are larger areas of color. On your A-Wing it looks like you used one or two pretty thick layers of green, already obscuring the panel line a bit. Its not terrible by any means, but it does show at close range.

So, to avoid that, thin your paint using water or acrylic thinner (water is fine most of the time, don't waste money. Thinner is mostly used to make blending techniques less of a pain). Then paint the areas you want to color in as thin layers as possible. If one doesn't cover well, don't keep on blobbing on paint. Let it dry, then apply the next one.

A wet pallet helps immensly with that, since your paint will keep its consistency for a long time. Saves you paint, too. To make one of those, take an air-tight container of some sort. put a good amount of paper towels on the bottom and soak them in water. Then add a piece of baking parchment. Thats where your colors go! If you want to take a break painting, put the lid on the container and maybe put it in the cooler if you live in a hot area. Doing this keeps your paints fresh for a few days.

Hope this helps. I am not much of a painting pro, but these are some of the quality of life things I picked up so far.

Really nice work so far! I like the improvement on the B-wing with the highlights, subtle but nicely done!

I would second Deathrains comments and stress the most important rule in miniature painting: thin your paints to a milky consistency for easy painting. Try several layers and be patient. The first layer might look very watery and not good at all but just keep adding very thin layers until you get a nice colour. It will work, I promise

For thinning purposes normal tap water will be fine for almost all paints. I recommend using an acrylic thinner for metallic paints though as they tend to mix better with them than water. You can also try adding highlights with a thin lighter grey drybrush on your dark grey parts of the model. It will add a lot of depth to your model.

It is difficult to avoid bleeding while using masking tape. You can try using the drybrush technique as the paint won't be wet and bleed through as much but always be prepared to "clean up" the model after using tape. Patience is key here

Please have a look at my website for some more tips and tricks, I hope it will help you: http://xwingminiaturespainting.com/

Until then... Happy creating!

And may the paint be with you

Welcome to the club, you're off to a great start.

The only suggestions I might have for your ships is that you might need some more contrast in the dark grey areas using a dry brush technique as Space Dragn suggested and/or deepening the shadows of the panel lines first with some of the Nuln Oil (just in the panel lines).

You may want to try some color variation on a few random panels as well. The Rebel ships don't seem be as neat about their paint jobs as the Imperials.

And if you feel confident enough, you might try to add some weathering, dents or blaster damage effects.

Here are two useful links: http://alternativewargamer.blogspot.se/2015/03/tutorial-scratches-dents-and-blaster.html

https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/190091-weathering-with-pencilsdirt-streaks-grime-rust-blaster-burns/?hl=pencil

Once you have those cockpits & engines painted, your ships are going to really pop!

Love the green!

Just checking up on you. How are your ships doing? Any new pics to post?