"Spray Painting Plastic Ogre Minis" Topic

My go-to technique for painting plastic sci-fi minis has always been to spray paint a speckled camouflage base using multiple colours. When the Ogre Miniatures Set 1 arrived last fall, i spent an evening prepping and painting two Green forces of conventional units.

Had a big Ogre game day this past weekend, and on Friday I prepped and painted two Red and two Blue forces, plus 1 Green Mk.III.

The rest of the plastic Ogres are getting trimmed now.

I'll brush treads and other details and dry-brush highlights later. The spray camo gets them presentable enough for the gaming table to start with. The speckles are more visible in person than in photos where the eye blends the tiny dots together.

The blue and the red plastics both light up under a black light. Th effect is so weird that I've hesitated painting my Ogre minis at all.

Hmm. I've held back the "glow in the dark" armor, painted up my blues as Paneuro and my reds--except for actual ogres--got painted green. I'm saving red for when SJG actually releases Combine models.

Still waiting, SJG.

Mo,

How do you spray a "speckled camouflage base using multiple colours"?

Do you use a mask and multiple passes or what?

Dave

I tend to use Krylon for the base coat because it dries so fast. For these, I sprayed the bottoms a solid colour just to be sure that any underhanging edges were covered. Didn't bother doing any speckling on the bottom since those underhanging edges won't show at all on these.

Once the bottoms were dried enough to handle, about an hour is plenty, I flip them over and paint the top. I give it a fairly solid coat with one colour, but don't need to cover everything completely since any small bits of plastic will add to the speckling.

Then I just start spraying with other colours, doing light spritzes from 8" to 12" away, and turning the tray to get the spritzes from all around.

I have some old cans of paint that the nozzles are partially clogged and they splatter. I take those cans and mark a big 'S' on them with a sharpie and save them just for jobs like this. The darkest blue speckles on the overall light blue minis came from such a Splatter can.

Sometimes the various paints will blend together a bit more than I would like. If that happens, I'll give them another colour after the initial work has dried. For this, I'll choose a colour that will stand out more against the blend, and give them a light spritzing from about 12" to 16" away. I did that with both Green Forces. The lighter coloured blend, I gave a later light spray of Desert Sand, and the darker blend a later light spray of Bright Medium Green.

I'll double check the Blue and Red Forces sometime and see if I want to add a highlight spray to any of them.

I also use this technique for painting stone and brick work!

n.b. Do not use Army Painter sprays with any paints that are still wet. While their mix provides a lovely thin primer base, it will turn everything into blended soup if trying to simultaneously spray multiple colours. It can be spritzed onto dry paints and vice-versa.

I have figured out how I want to paint the glow in the dark minis, but I'm waiting for Set #2 to arrive so I can do them all at once.

Instead of usual primer, I'll give them a spray of Dullcote to get a finish that will hold acrylic paint. I'm ordering some of Stuart Semple's amazing paint pigments and will do the GitD's in a zebra stripe camo of the world's flattest black and LIT (glow in the light green).

I have seen these pigments, they are amazing — the light-emitting LIT is brighter than the ambient light in most gaming areas!
link

Ogre Mk.III's and Mk.V's spray painted in base speckled colours for the Forces of Red and the Froces of Not-So-Red:

Recently finished spraying the base speckled coats on the Ogres of Blue and Not-so-Blue, and Green and Not-so-Green: