What Is Dry Brushing?
The dry brush technique is a method of producing very fine, wispy lines of paint on a surface. It is useful in paintings for blending colors into backgrounds to create gradual shadows or fine textures.
For miniatures, the technique is especially useful for creating miniature wood graining effects or tiny blends of color on faux surfaces like stone. It is also used very effectively to create aging and weathering effects on gaming miniatures, military models, or railway models, as it helps to create very subtle color blends in small scale.
How Do You Dry Brush Paint?
To dry brush for miniatures and scale models, it often works best to have a fine bristled, fairly stiff brush. The technique is used in two ways. For fine speckled effects, a dry brush is prepared and gently touched down in a straight or pouncing motion onto a surface. For fine lines, the dry brush is pulled across the surface after touching down, and for blending shadows or aging models, you can use either the pouncing stroke or draw fine lines across each other to blend color gently into the background shade.
How to Prepare A Dry Brush for Painting
To prepare a brush for the dry brush technique, dry your brush on a paper towel or rag, so that any water from previous painting or cleaning is mostly removed.
Load your brush with paint at the tip, the press it gently straight down onto a flat surface (the center of a painting palette, a tile, flat plate, or piece of paper.) This step removes the excess paint from the tip of the brush and pushes extra paint back into the bristles.
Press your brush down onto a folded paper towel to make sure the very tips of the bristle are dry, then test the brush on a piece of paper or a sample surface. The technique is very similar to preparing a stencil brush for adding paint to a stencilled area. If your brush is correctly prepared, you should be able to produce either very fine distinct lines from individual bristles on your brush, or a light series of tiny dots with the tips of the bristles.
Experiment with different brushes and paint types until you get a feel for how much paint your brush will carry. You need to remove the excess paint after each time you load the brush with paint. With practise you will determine how little paint to load the brush with, and whether you should load your brush by pouncing it in a thin layer of paint on a tile, plate or paint palette, or if you can dip the brush lightly enough to keep it fairly dry, just needing to remove paint from the tips before you make your dry brush stroke.
