Federation Commander

Sorry to keep pestering you guys.

A couple questions:

1) My test minis are (as I've said) kobalds. The 10 figures I'm working on have four or five colors: black base, blue skin, brown clothes, black leather straps, bone skulls, armor colored weapons and chainmail. They look sort of paint-by-numberish and lame. I was thinking of watering down some black and slathering that on in order to fill in the eyes and make them look less monochromatic... is that the best solution...?

2) My Romulan squadron is cleaned up and ready for priming-- just waiting for the temperature to get back up past fifty. Will I be able to sand away imperfections on the primer or should I obsess over everything I can see right now? There are scratches where I stabbed the minis with an exacto-knife while cleaning off the... what is it... flashing(?). Sandpaper is useless for this sort of clean-up... should I be looking for really small files or something? Also... my warbird has a nick gouged out of the wind.... How can I plug the hole before I start painting...?

I can't speak to the first question.

To the second, I would try and get everything done before priming (though there are some exceptions to that - see later). I would also recommend a set of small jewelers files, they're nearly essential for getting rid of all the mold lines and extra flashing on miniatures.

In some cases, you may want to use the primer to smooth out some parts of the miniature if it has a lot of holes or an orange peel look to it. If this is the case, I have known some people to spray the primer on and then file it down so that the whole surface is flat, and it would look like having islands of primer in a sea of metal.

For filling holes in miniatures, you can use any one of the various hobby putties out there. "Green stuff" or two part (yellow blue = green) epoxy putty is common, as are some other "one part" putties.

A good set of needle files is really essential for cleaning flash and mold lines off of any miniature.

As for imperfections and gaps, small ones can be filled with gap-filling super glue, but I find ProCreate to be better than green stuff for big gap filling - it smooths better and has less memory when sculpting.

For the nick, I would use just superglue and baking soda if you don't have any green stuff. Just use a little dab of superglue and spread some baking soda over the glue. Baking soda is very fine and will be easy to sand down to hide the imperfection.

malleman, that is a great suggestion! Never thought of that, but I can see why it would work. Cool! Learned something new today!

Some times I find myself priming a mini twice. No matter how hard I try, I frequently don't spot every inperfection on the first run. But, I've found the first layer of primer/paint really makes them jump out. As a result, it I have any doubts about hitting everything, I'll put a very light coat of primer on and survey the mini again. Doesn't seem to hurt detail much as long as you keep the first coat light.