Tutorial - Making snow advanced way

posted by roman, jarhead, kong

Aloa.

After SkelettetS asked me over on CMON about this theme i thought about writing a little article to it. Here comes the question:

... so off to the question! after looking at you kickass Soul Guardian i thought i had to ask for some advice/recepie making snow, the more "advanced" way so to speak, as iv never done any snow effects before im a little scared to ruin lots of hard work. btw, here's the guy that's getting some!

hope you have some time to give me a hint or two and help out a poor newbie
cheers!

MAKING SNOW THE ADVANCED WAY
First i got to say that i have not made new photos about this theme as i am drowning in ideas and work these days, but i will explain it to you like a charging Mammoth, so i guess everyone might get what i mean.

First, check out this Tutorial about snow, that is basically my go to working with snow on miniature bases. Now with that knowledge we now try to make it a bit more advanced. These techniques are new to me too - let's try to make snow which looks more realistic and i'll also try to explain how to make such snowflakes:

First take a look on the snow at the ground. It is done like in the upper linked tutorial with one small difference. I did use a mix of matte varnish by Vallejo Model Air 71059 and water (~60/40) to spray it over the snow after i did put it on the base with PVC Glue, it should not be completly dried. This makes the snow look more realistic in my eyes, it looks a bit more wet and more fresh, like fallen just 2 hours ago. When you use your Airbrush system to get this mix up to the base make sure you do it with very small air pressure. If you do it with too much you blow away all of your snow material. Let it dry afterwards and it looks like this:

In these 3 examples above you can see some snowflakes on the miniatures or some kind of snow which remains on the back of a cloak from walking through a deeply snowed forest or being in the middle of a snow storm. I don't think the snowflakes are good for gaming miniatures as they are not perfectly stuck to the models, when touching while gaming you could easily destroy them. If you do a display piece it is fine in the end, at least i think you are touching your display pieces not that often and when you do you put your hands on the socket. Now it is really simply creating such snowflakes, but first have a look at them again...

To create such snowflakes take some of the matte Varnish by Vallejo Model Air Colour 71059 - maybe it works with others too, but i have no other here so i can't promise anything - and mix it with some water on a place you call your "mix-station-for-dirty-stuff". Take a tip of a brush from it, now with this wet brush get some of your Natron (= bicarbonate of soda or baking soda) up to the brush and you now see that it becomes something like wet snow. Now you can choose how small or big your snowflakes will be by splitting the pieces you got. Then put them on the place you wish for. The good part is, that the matte varnish keeps it in place, the bad part is that it is very fragile, so i would propose this only for the use on display miniatures.

That's it! Short tutorial but i hope helpful in the end!
Keep on happy painting!

Regards
Roman