As has become one of my calling cards in miniature painting, chequerboards tend to give away my entries in competitions.
@Stumpy asked the other day how I achieve the effect . I decided to blog it’s a future reference piece.
First of all - why should I paint chequerboards. Because you should. Because it’s awesome. Ask any Ska fan (am-I-right @Fuggit_Khan ?!)
Checks are delightfully old school and warhamerian. The check and the hazard stripe (in 40k) screams a certain era of miniature painting and I love it.
Next - how?
I joked to Charlie that you “just paint a chequerboard” but that’s kinda 90% of it. However there are some extra steps to make it pop a bit.
Paint I’ll be using:
Black, dark grey, light grey and white. (You’ll use a surprisingly small amount of pure white.)
So step one - using light grey I paint the checks. Don’t need a small brush just a half descent brush tip.
I do this by drawing small squares
Then I fill them in
Once completed it looks like this - does not have to be perfect when working on curved surfaces as the viewer hardly notices. On flat surfaces you may wanna take your time.
Now you have a chequerboard. Done. But it you want it to pop a bit more this is how I do it.
I use white paint to edge highlight the light grey parts.
Then I use dark grey to edge highlight the black parts in such a way that it serves as a continuation of the edge highlight.
My attitude towards edge highlighting is very thick and cartoony. I like my models to pass the 3ft test. People with actual talent, can be found elsewhere on this forum…
Next, a final Optional step is to water down your paint a tiny bit and make some vaguely white cloudy splodges (let me know if I’m using too much technical language here) within each light grey bit and equally cloudy splodges with dark grey paint within the black sections.
Done!
This is a mega easy speed paint.
The checks on these models took less than 20 mins to do, batch painting in this way.
Any questions, just ask.
Jac
