Why can I see brush strokes and patchy coverage in my Warhammer paint?

What the marks mean

• Raised stripes that follow the brush. The coat is too thick, or the brush was overloaded. Thin the paint a touch more and wipe the brush on the palette edge first.
• See-through patches after two coats. A hard colour, or a dark undercoat. Start from a lighter undercoat. Reds and yellows need it most.
• A dull, chalky finish. The paint was thinned too far. Add more paint to the mix, not more water.
• Ridged lines where a stroke stopped. You came back to a half-dry edge. Leave it alone; our page on bumpy paint has the detail.

How thin is thin enough

The Games Workshop paint guide says Base paints carry more pigment and give strong, solid coats, while Layer paints carry less and flow better off the brush. Either way, thinning is normal practice. Albert Moreto Font, a painter featured by Warhammer Community, Games Workshop's news site, says the first thing he wishes he had known was to thin his paints. There is no single perfect consistency, because glazing, texturing and drybrushing each want something different.

For a basecoat, our rule is to thin the paint until it flows off the brush tip and dries without ridges, but still hides most of the colour underneath after two coats. Put a drop on a palette, add water a drop at a time, and test on the back of the model or a spare sprue. Games Workshop's own hobby-area guide lists a water pot and a palette for watering down and mixing paint, so you need little to start. A Servo-Skull Palette has 24 paint wells and is sold out at the moment.

A coat that does not streak

1. Load the brush so it is wet but not dripping, and wipe one side on the edge of the palette.
2. Start in the middle of a panel and use long strokes in one direction. Many small strokes leave more marks than a few long ones.
3. Do not go back. If you spot a gap, leave it and fix it on the next coat.
4. Let the coat dry fully. Then look at it. Add a second thin coat only where the undercoat still shows.
5. Stop when the colour is solid.

Wide brushes cover faster than small ones. Base brushes are sold for this job, and the ones we list are below.

Reds and yellows need a lighter start

Some colours do not cover in one go. Tyler Mengel, who painted a Howling Griffons Space Marine for Warhammer Community, calls red and yellow two of the harder colours to paint. When the patchiness is red or yellow, the fix is a paler undercoat. Games Workshop's painters pick White Scar for the most vivid yellow. Our page on painting yellow goes through that colour in detail, and painting white covers a colour with problems of its own.