The way I paint my Chaos Dwarf 3.0 miniatures

 Well, this is a bit of a post that mostly details my "style" for painting wargame miniatures, to a good playable standard and a bit out of the box from most other hobbyists.

But it is a style I developped, inspired 20+ ish years ago by Kevin Dallimore when I first saw it in Wargames Illustrated for the Foundry Dark Africa range.

In essence, it is the applyling of coat after coat, usually three layers, on the figure, but I made a switch in the second layer.  This being influenced by Gundam games on the Playstation where I discovered their cell shading art style.

The thing is I paint in each surface and colour with a lighter tone, but instead of putting the second layer to the edges, I do it to the centre.  This, in my opinion, gives a relatively average manner of painting time, but allows for large heaps of figures being done a colour at a time.  And for some simpler or smaller models, like 6mm or gachapon 1/400 scale gundams, it can even be done with just two layers instead of three to give a good gaming table looking force.

To examplefy this, I went with the resin Prophet I have lined up for my Chaos Dwarf force, produced by Norba Miniatures.

After the needed preparations, the model is then first undercoated with black.  Pretty simple and standard technique, especially as it will be a figure in darker colours.  With metal figures, I now also apply a coat of black ink to fill in the nooks and crannies better.

The first layer is then painted on, this one can be permitted to be a bit messy, as any cover-ups will be done in the second layer.  It consists of the darker variant of the colour I want the figure to become in the end.

The second layer is the most important one, as not only will it be the colours one sees when viewing the figure on the table.  This layer is the dominant one, and any small misses as such can be covered up as well in this phase of the painting.

The third and final layer is the highlight for each and every area, and provides the needed visual contrast.  A colour a bit lighter as such is then used for this.

That makes one painted figure that only needs some basing.  To do that, fine decoration sand is added to base (yeah, it's pink, still have a lot of that stuff).

Now, this uses a more traditional approach, being in my case being painted a dark grey, and then the areas the sand remained stuck softly drybrushed a medium toned grey.  But for the lava parts on the base, being the holes where the sand didn`t stick after liberally sprinkled on the PVA glue, I used the above technique again.  Except this has four instead of three layers just because I like the result better.

And there you have it, my painting style.  It won't win any contests or awards, but it does make for a decent looking force on the table.  Surely, it takes longer then the modern day techniques of washes and contrasts for sure, but back in the day, it was actually faster (and cleaner to work) then when drybrushing was all the thing!