Painting small detail parts to add life and character to your models is a step that takes a good eye and very steady hand. Though tedious and time-consuming, painting these sometimes almost microscopic details can be fun and it doesn’t have to take up your entire evening!
Here’s how I paint most of my detail parts including barrels, trash cans, chimneys, ladders and other miscellaneous objects.
Removing Scraps & Burs
The first step is to cut off any burrs or leftover lines that are created from the manufacturer molds. Here’s a photo showing both the little stem piece that needs cut off and sanded along with the little scrap edges that are left on each side of the detail part.
To remove this leftover junk I simply cut (with proper safety glasses and hand protection) the larger parts off and gently sand the rest off with a fine grit sandpaper. Try hard to not remove much of the details.
Once I have all of the manufacturing junk removed from the detail part, I paint it with flat black spray paint (I use the cheap-o generic flat paint). If it’s a part that doesn’t stand well on its own I make a tape doughnut out of painters tape and stick it to my painting box to allow the detail part to stand to be painted.
Let the spray paint dry, then check it to make sure there aren’t any areas with the metal or plastic showing. If it is, just hit it with a quick spray to cover that area up.
Now that the parts are covered up in spray paint and the paint has completely dried I get the paints that I want for my pieces. In this example I’m painting a barrel and I want to add depth in the color of the detail part, so I’m using two colors of acrylic paint, Folk Art 942 Honeycomb and Folk Art 472 Mushroom.
Dry Brushing the Color On
This third step is the fastest and easiest part and it’s simply just dry brush your colors onto the detail part. This technique will obviously differ a little bit per type of detail, but I use generally the same technique each time.
For the barrels, I dry brushed the darker brown on first and let it dry. Then I followed it up with the lighter highlight color to make the barrel look like it had a little texture since it’s wood and all.
One thing I want to note when I dry brush my detail parts is that I try to dry brush them in the opposite direction of prominent details. So for this barrel, I went around the barrel rather than top to bottom so I could keep the vertical lines of the barrel’s wood pieces from filling in with paint. This just keeps the details from filling in and becoming unrecognizable.
Sometimes I’ll take one extra step and dip the parts into my dark india ink wash, but not always. I usually save this for the ‘metal’ details like vents, tanks, gears, etc.
The main thing I want to get out there about painting these parts is that you don’t need to make it a daunting and time-eating task. The method that I explained above is the fastest way that I’ve found to paint most parts and it really only takes a couple minutes per part. So have fun with it, get creative, add multiple colors if you can to add depth and stop having naked buildings! Because after all, a building without some outside detail looks… well, it looks naked. ADD SOME DETAILS TO THAT THING!
