How to Paint Smooth Blends Without an Airbrush
This post is part of the Notts Hobbies 30 Day Army Painting Accelerator, Click here to get your free copy.
I'm sure you’ve seen all the smooth blends on Instagram and YouTube, and people spending hours glazing or learning to wet blend.
There’s a quicker way to produce smooth blends, stippling.
Stippling is a technique that involves applying paint in small, controlled dots or dabs, rather than in long strokes.
A drybrush is used to stipple paint onto a miniature, you remove most of the paint from your brush, like drybrushing. Instead of wiping your brush across a miniature, you gently stab it.
Each bristle leaves a small dot of paint on the model, allowing you to build up colour over multiple “stabs.” When stippling, you can paint a hint of a colour or build up to a solid block of colour.
When stippling, remove the paint like you would with overbrushing or drybrushing. You can control the amount of paint deposited on the model by controlling the amount of paint on your brush.
Instead of blending colours using more time-consuming methods like glazing, you can create a smooth blend using stippling. With each stab, you add more colour to the mini, building up colour as you go.
Below is a base where I’ve started stippling on two-thirds of the base to mark out the area I’ll paint yellow.
Then I fill in the block colour on the left side.
Then I tidy up the blend.
If you need to, you can stipple on the first colour you used, red, to help smooth out the blend.
To use this technique, click here to view our range of drybrushing products.
This post is part of the Notts Hobbies 30 Day Army Painting Accelerator, Click here to get your free copy.
Glossary
Blending – creating a smooth change from one colour to another colour
Drybrush – Is a wide paint brush that doesn’t have a tip, designed for drybrushing
Drybrushing - a miniature painting technique where most of the paint is removed from the brush so it deposits paint on the raised surfaces of a model.
Glazing - painting a very thin layer of paint to tint a surface
Overbrushing - a miniature painting technique where some of the paint is removed from the brush so the paint isn’t deposited in the deepest parts of a model.
Stippling - applying paint in small, controlled dots
Wet blending – creating a smooth change from one colour to another colour before the paint dries