Hopefully, I'll have time to do some painting soon. First, I have to get my Dreadball teams painted, then I want to do some of my X-Wing miniatures. My question, to those who have shown us some absolutely phenomenal work on here, is this: what do you do to the minis pre-painting? do you primer it? do you scrub off and remove the original paint?, or do you just paint over?

If its miner colour markings then over the top works just fine. If your doing the whole ship primer might be best but I haven't done a whole ship redo yet so don't hold me to the last bit

I soak them in Castrol Super Clean for a day or two and then scrub them a couple of times with a tooth brush.

The paint is very thin so this might not be necessary.

Treat the prepaint as your basecoat and go over the top. It's way less hassle and a lot of preshading and stuff is done for you. What are you planning on repainting?

I usually just paint right over and then apply a wash and add a few other details. It's fast and effective mthod for pumping out lots of Repaints. Here's an A wing I just did using that method.

http://postimg.org/image/w5okidohn/

Absolutely nothing wrong with painting right over things. It's given me no difficulty.

Treat the prepaint as your basecoat and go over the top. It's way less hassle and a lot of preshading and stuff is done for you. What are you planning on repainting?

Not sure yet. Definitely a pair of A-Wings, and at least one each of the larger ships. I'll definitely keep at least one of each large and 2 of each small stock, but will eventually repaint most of the others.

Almost all of mine have been overpaints... I primed my first one, Firespray, for a Kath Scarlet repaint, I only did it for a consistent cover and so I could have even coverage of white for the repaint...

I've seen people try to strip off the base paint and it always seems to be too much effort for too little reward. And some have damaged the model as well, melting parts and losing detail with too harsh chemicals..

I'm not an expert painter by any means, but I have done several now. I don't strip them as painting over them seems to work really well. Here's how I did my last A-Wing:

Paint right over.

Old school painter, I mostly use enamels too.

I've done both. The first 2 X wings I did I stripped first. Since then I've painted over them. Though I did learn the other day to not try to hand paint a gray base followed by white coat on them by hand. It seemed that the the gray wasn't covering at all when I watered it down to my normal thickness, but when left thicker, it was too thick.

So... after an hour or so in brake fluid (yes, this works, at least on X wing, no clue if other minis use other plastics) it was fully stripped of both my paint and the stock paint. Time to use the airbrush again (but it so cold in the garage!) to get the base coat on properly.

If you want a bit more bite to work on without going a primer coat you could give the ship a light spray of matt varnish then paint over that.

needs a wash

needs a wash

You can use my shower if you like. Sorry I saw it just there and it has to be done.

only if Leia will be there }