The Warforge Miniature Modelling and Conversion


Feb
2010
72:49
am

Dental hygene not just for teeth

So, this was something I'd heard about and felt like trying.

boomwagon013

The idea's straightforward enough - you use toothpaste as a mask for airbrushing. As you'll notice, and as I've since come to determine, I've applied the stuff like a bit of a moron - I should have kept it to the edges of plates and the likes, but I really didn't know what I was doing. Anyway, you simply squirt a bit of toothpaste out onto a palette and grab a sponge like blister foam and just dab it around a bit. Then you airbrush right over it. Which is what I did!

boomwagon014 boomwagon015

I decided to go for a Goff Scheme that I imagine will be a fair bit black, but I made the tank a bit more on the grey end of things because I figure I'll end up using some Black Wash on the armor later on in the process to make the plates stand out a bit better... which will bring the grey shades right back down to a dark, Goff-y color.

Anyway, once the airbrushed paint has a chance to dry a little bit, removing the toothpaste is incredibly simple - you just hold the tank under a faucet, and off it comes in about a minute, no scrubbing required. You'll notice from my final results that the masking looks a bit more like... well, some sort of retarded camo scheme, rather than rust, largely due to my irresponsible toothpaste placement. Also, I didn't pick up on the fact that the toothpaste would mask off some areas almost transparently - a very thin layer of the stuff's all that's needed, and I didn't realize just how effective it'd end up being.

It's interesting, for sure, and most of all it seems to do it's own sort've blacklining around the 'rust' areas. I'm hoping at this point I'll be able to cut the effect down a bit by painting some plates in red colors and adding things like checkmarks.