[Step 1] Learning how to paint systematically

[Realjuan]

tl;dr: Can you write a few painting techniques names. Dont worry about duplicates or "right" name.

According to must people I cannot be perfect on the first attempt, so being a computer scientist I figure I need to approach this learning process systematically.

My idea is to acquire metal practice models and practice painting technique on them before I use them on my army. I figure the best way to do this is to have a decent list of painting techniques and start from the easiest to the hardest.

Being new I dont know many painting techniques or how hard they are, so I love if you could write names of techniques. Do not worry about if someone else wrote it before, I will sort it out.

Hopefully this will help future new painters by having an index of guides by difficulty, links to a couple of YouTube and web tutorials.

My list:
Flash & Mold line removal -Easy
Non-metallic metal - Hard
Free-Hand - Hard
Blacklining - Hard
Blending- Hard
Seamless blending - Hard
Washes/Shading - Easy
Highlighting - Easy
Dry Brushing -Easy
Blackwash - Hard
Rust
Object Source Lighting
WetBlend
Greenstuff
Value Tinting

 

[Zhatan]

I would just like to say that I don't think blending is a technique by itself but there are different ways to blend. Such as wet blending, layering, glazes or washing.
The same goes for highlighting. You have simple edge highlights or dry brushed highlights to harder stuff where you gradually build up to the highlight you want.

There is also directional highlighting that works well when photographing a mini from certain angles but might not look as good on the battlefield.

 

[Mad 'At]

Strippling - a sort of drybrush technique where you have more and wetter paint in the brush and you sort of stab the surface to create a sort of texture. Easy I'd say.

Greenstuffing is something you might want to separate a bit too. There are of course endless things you can sculpt so it's hard to make a complete list of it. But there are a few things that I can be looked upon separately, gap filling and fur sculpting comes to mind.

Another thing that you might want to separate is washing and shading. There can be some confusion regarding these, as what is (or was) generally know as washing now is done with the GW paints called shades. To me however, shading is something different, where you paint the shadows where you want them, directly into the recesses or even other places (like when doing NMM). Kind of like inverse highlighting. Something that can further be separated here is shading with complementary colours, where you use colours from the other side of the colour wheel to paint shades.

Something I'm curious about is the difference between layering and highlighting, so if you find out anything on that be sure to let me know

One last thing is that I wonder why there is no medium categories in difficulty, as I find it weird that drybrushing and highlighting is of the same difficulty (drybrushing is generally consider much more simple, but then again, there are painters who can do wonders with drybrushing (looking at you Mioum)).

 

[Realjuan]

First thank you for your replies.
@Zhatan I will divide those terms a more. Although I do not care that much for photography I will add directional highlighting too, in case future readers are interested.

@Mad 'At Greenstuff and me are in complicated terms atm, but I agree greenstuff itself requires probably a full learning guide. The categories are not correct, but its just my impression from what people write in forums. I have not tried 80% of techniques, so I have no idea how hard or easy they are. My first step is doing the list, then research for videos/tutorials, pre-testing categorizing, trying the techniques and finally a list arrange with difficulty level.

 

[Banat]

OSL is on my list of techniques to learn/develop skill at. I've seen a VC army done almost entirely in monochrome save for choice OSL points in units and its so so effective.