“DRY BRUSHING” – CAF: 101 – TUTORIAL TUESDAY

CUSTOM ACTION FIGURES: 101 – “DRY BRUSHING” – TUTORIAL TUESDAY
By Rob Panick

This week on , we’re going to be taking a look at dry brushing your figures. Dry brushing is a paint technique where your paint brush is relatively dry when you apply the paint. This is done by loading your brush with paint, and them wiping a majority of the paint off on a rag, paper towel, or cloth. The result is an almost “scratchy” look, where the raised portion of the surface detail is highlighted, but the crevices of the detail remains the base color.

For dry brushing, you will need the following:
PAINT (A lighter or contrasting shade to your base color.)
PAINT PALLET (A plate, figure package bubble, etc. will work.)

A RAG, CLOTH, OR PAPER TOWEL (For this tutorial, I’ll be using a rag.)
PAINT BRUSH (For this technique there are several brushes that work well; flat brushes, angled brushes, fan brushes, “scruffy” brushes, as well as different sponges and makeup brushes. Experiment with different brushes for different effects.)

For the dry brushing technique, it generally works best if your base color is darker than your highlight color, or you use a color for highlighting that has a strong contrast to your base color. For this tutorial, I painted my base coat matte black and I’ll be using grey, sliver and white highlight colors.

Begin by dipping your brush into slightly thinned paint. You will want the paint to soak all the way into your bristles.

Next, using a rag rub the bristles of your brush to remove the excess paint. You will want to rub it until you don’t see any obvious signs of paint on the bristles. Don’t worry, there’s still paint in there, as will be obvious when you start brushing.

Now you will want to rub the bristles of your brush across the grain of the detail textures in the sculpt of your figure. By rubbing against the grain, you will be putting paint only on the high points of the sculpt, while leaving the “valleys” with the color of your base paint. Don’t be afraid to bare down a little with your brush and open up the bristles. Deep within the bristles is where the paint is hiding!

When using a “fan” type brush or a sponge, you’ll load the paint and rub it off the same way, however you will want to apply lighter pressure when brushing the paint onto your figure.

You can achieve a really nice effect by layering different colors using the dry brushing technique. Experiment with using different brushes to get different effects. Just remember, the goal is to paint only the high points of the sculpt and leave the base color showing in the lower parts. You can also experiment with using cotton swabs, your fingers… pretty much anything you can use to apply paint can be used to achieve a cool dry brushing effect.