by Autoduelist
I do dry brushing as well, but since most board game miniatures are only low to medium quality, I don't get to do it as much as a I like. Washes and inks are good for telling me where I have to shade, but there's always clean-up work afterwords. A lot of my work didn't even use washes, I just adding the shading manually myself.I use cheap paints too. You can check out my gallery to see what you can accomplish with them. I recommend quality miniature paints for metals since they tend to flow better. If you find metals too troubling to work with, you can fake it with grays and yellows with a technique I describe below.
The post highlighting with a light wash will definitely mute the colors and "reset" your drybrush work. I've used the technique to correct sections of models that I drybrushed too heavily (eg - the section looks more like I painted it the highlight color). I've found a pair of scenarios where the post highlight light wash can be very useful:
1.) If you paint a miniature bright yellow and then give it a medium brown wash you can fake gold really well. The same goes for steel / pig iron. Paint the miniature silver or gray and then use a black wash. A camera reveals the trickery, but with normally eyesight or tabletop level it looks great.
The whole sword here doesn't use any metal paints.
The blade here is gray. The armor is actual metal paint with washes and dry brushing applied.
2.) Black leather - a popular choice for many figures I've painted - can work really well if you paint the figure black, drybrush heavily with gray, and then do a light black wash. The trick to black leather is you need the gray to add some depth to the model, but you don't want it too gray, otherwise the outfit looks like it's charcoal gray instead of being black with reflected light.
Again, the camera here reveals the trickery, but with normal eyesight or tabletop level views, the color seems to "pop" and you are convinced it's truly a figure wearing black. I've found miniatures without this technique look dull and flat because there's no shading on black to indicate depth.
