From sprue to paint
It’s already January.... and it’s time for a new hobby tutorial. In this one, I will try to tackle something you don’t see very often on the net because “it’s too easy” or “oh, maaaan... I’m already waaaay ahead of that!”. We’re about to talk about how to bring your miniatures from the sprue to the painting station. Keep reading if you’re interested.
I know it may sound like I’m slacking and I don’t have any “real” tutorial ready for the blog but believe me, I’m not. I have plenty of advanced techniques in the pipeline that I would like to tackle here but then I thought: are they really going to be useful if your minis are not properly prepared? So, here I go with a super-beginner tutorial on how you should prepare your miniatures. We are going to bring a couple of easy-to-build Poxwalkers from the sprue to the paint stage! Without actually painting them though... maybe next time.
The workspace
First of all: free your workspace. You want to stay on the clean side especially if you are about to build some model with tons of small pieces. You don’t want to lose them or mix 'em up. So get your flat edge clippers, the Exacto-knife and the spues you are about to work with. If you need to separate the pieces some sort of lure box may be useful too.
Clip the models off
The first step of the process is (obviously) to clip the models off the sprue. This should be trivial but sometimes it gets difficult because of how the sprue is designed: either the pin to be cut is badly positioned or model details can end too close to it and you risk to destroy them with the clippers. The most important thing is always to keep in mind these rules:
always cut with the flat side of the clippers facing the model
if the clippers barely fit in the sprue, just use the tips to cut. If they’re properly sharpened you won’t have problems and avoid any collateral damage
think twice before you cut: sometimes what you think should be cut should not... and it’s really hard to repair damages to tiny details
You can see some pin-shaped detail right by the clippers: you can damage it or cut it off if you misjudge. Special care is, again, advised.
Clean the cut points
When you clip the pieces off the sprue, try to remember where the connecting pin was: even with flat edge clippers you will have plastic leftovers that will need to be properly clean so, remembering where you cut can help a lot. As you can see in the following picture, it doesn’t matter how careful you are, you will always have some junk to cut off with your Exacto.
This is a crucial step in this phase as it affects the painting stage and the overall final result. So, be super careful when shaving those bumps off to bring back the original miniature shape.
Remove mould-lines
They say one man’s mould-lines are someone else’s bonus detail... but not really. You want to remove those ugly lines the mould leaves behind even before getting to the priming stage. You can find overpriced pieces of steel to do this job but you can easily obtain the same results with the back of your Exacto. Grab it between your thumb and index fingers as you can see in the blurry picture below and gently scrape up and down.
You want to remove the line so that it doesn’t show when you prime the figure but beware that the white-ish color will remain visible so don’t scratch too much. Touch the part with your fingertips or nails to see if you can locate the mould-line: if you cannot and the part feels smooth, you are done.
Assemble the miniatures
Or not. It depends. Sometimes you don’t want to assemble your miniatures before you are done with painting. For this tutorial, I chose two different miniatures to show you what I mean. Take a look at these two figures.
As you can see, after dry fitting all the pieces, the dude on the right looks pretty easy to paint as-is with just the left hand slightly covering the hips. The other guy, on the contrary, has the huge axe covering all the front part of the body, from the chest/belly to the left thigh. To make things worse, the hidden parts can be seen pretty well even with the axe mounted on (cannot really see this in the picture). In cases like this, if you want to really do a good paint job, you should leave the axe off and paint in subassemblies. I usually do this for huge models with a lot of parts that block LOP (line of paintbrush) but not LOS (line of sight) to ease the job a little. Many people do not mind to paint in subassemblies but I urge you to first try to dry fit your models. Try to grab a brush and work it around the overlapping part as if it were glued in place. If you start hitting here and there or if you struggle to get in the deepest recesses, just leave the piece off and paint the parts separately.
Prepare for priming
The last step is to go and grab your miniature holders (one for each miniature/part) and prepare the pieces for the primer. If you are a rattle-can kind of painter you should first stick them to a cardboard box with some double-sided tape but if you usually brush-on or airbrush your primer you are good to go.
On a side note, don’t glue the miniatures to the bases yet: you will need to texture and paint them if you want a good result (see tutorial here) and you really risk to get paint on the main figure if you don’t separate them when painting. In this picture, I just put the miniatures on the bases ‘cause they’re slotted bases and they can help the miniature holder to keep the figures steady. In most cases, you have normal flat bases so this is not even a problem but you will nonetheless feel the urge to glue the models on. Don’t do it until the base is done: you will save yourself a lot of problems down the road and the whole process will feel more efficient.
So, this is, in a nutshell, how I prepare all my miniatures for the painting stage. In this hobby, modeling is as important as painting or playing so you definitely want to get the best models you can. If you follow these steps and use some common sense you will get above-average results even if you are a total beginner so get them nailed down before moving to more complex models!
Let me know what you think in the comments and if you have any question, just ask!
... game on!
