Dry brushing help.

[TheHiveKing]

I am new to painting miniatures. I tried dry brushing the other day and it turned out horrible. There were lumps of paint on it and i lost a lot of detail on the model trying to dry brush. Can anyone tell me what i did wrong?

[tylertt]

Were you wiping the paint off onto a cloth or piece of paper towel? By the sounds of it, you still had too much paint on the brush.

[jimmyp]

The brush should be dry before and get paint on the brush in all the bristles. Then use a paper towel or sponge to thoroughly brush off the paint until you can no longer see any paint visible. Brush it in all directions and squash it to remove the paint.
Key is too do light long strokes in one direction then switch if necessary. Do little then build it up to the effect you wish to have....
There are dry brush paints you can try too which are usually more powdered.

[TheHiveKing]

May 11, 2015 19:07:16 GMT jimmyp said:

The brush should be dry before and get paint on the brush in all the bristles. Then use a paper towel or sponge to thoroughly brush off the paint until you can no longer see any paint visible. Brush it in all directions and squash it to remove the paint.
Key is too do light long strokes in one direction then switch if necessary. Do little then build it up to the effect you wish to have....
There are dry brush paints you can try too which are usually more powdered.

I did wipe it on a paper towel, but i might have not wiped it enough.

[beefythepug]

yeah sounds like too much paint on the brush. Keep dabbing your paper towel til almost no pigment comes out. Then dab it a couple more times for good measure. Then use jimmyp 's suggestion for technique.

[BattleMetalChris]

Also if you're drybrushing a contrasting colour (drybrushing white onto black for example) try doing two layers, the first one a mid colour (grey in the case of the example above) before you do the final colour.

As people have said, make sure your brush is actually dry. If you paint it across your hand, and it puts paint down, then it's still too wet.