Milky art and blog

Something I have recently gotten into are little miniatures that can be used for old table top games like dungeons and dragons, pathfinder, and most famously warhammer and warhammer 40k. These small 2-3 inch little figures are packing details comparable to master grades but on a much smaller scale. While I can never justify or will every justify their price (some basic miniatures for 1 single unit cost as much as a HG or MG in some cases, yet only be about as big as a foot from said kit range.) They do help in learning skills to bring over to your kits, specifically MG and PG with how much detail is packed into those.

In this article I'm going to go over some basic skills you learn from miniature as well as how they transition over to gunpla and painting. Here are 6 reasons why miniatures help with gunpla and why you should give it a try.

1. Removing seam and mold lines.

In most if not all miniatures you will see some small mold lines (small lines of plastic) on the kit that are out of place and all in the same spot all over the model. This is something that will always happen on molds when a kit is made as part of the forming process. These lines are simple to remove and fix with just a knife gently scraping in the same direction of the line. A little scrape and some light sanding will fix these up.

The mold lines from the kit as it was created. Notice the lines up and down the armor as well as the excess plastic sprue

While not as prominent on gunpla kits you will still see these from time to time, most notably on the hands, fingers, and poly caps. You can use the same method above to fix, though more sanding may be required. If the kit is a meki plated kit however, you will need to repaint to fix this. While newer kits are better at hiding seam lines from molding, you still get seam lines when putting multiple parts together that require glue and work to fix.

Older gundam  kits have noticeable seam lines like this that can be removed from glue and sanding.

2. Thinning your paint!

This is perhaps the most important thing you can learn from this is layering and thinning your paint. Since these things are small, it helps to have your paint as thin as possible so as to not obscure details. It is OK if the first layer of paint does not cover the bottom most layer with how thin it is. Let it dry then go over again with a second layer to fully cover the spot as thin as possible. With miniature paints, its typically 2 parts paint 1 part water, to make it nearly milky, kind of like if you were airbrushing. Not so watery the paint runs but not so thick that it covers everything.

This skill helps a lot when your doing airbrushing. Even regular hand painting when you get to those super detailed kits. It teaches you when your doing too much paint and till little. Its better to have multiple thin layers with more work than 1 thick layer with no details.

There are at least 3 different colors on the bottom plate with nearly 10 layers of thin paint.

The ball ver ka is a simple kit until you look at all the detail packed on the inside which requires paint.

My current miniatures stand with most of my miniatures paints and airbrush paints.