Digital Camo/Straight Edges TUTORIAL

The day has come! I've released it to the world!

 

This is how I customize. Seriously. This technique is kind of the basis of my skill. I've used it on almost everything I've made since...Oh god...April of last year. All it is is a way to take advantage of paint's tendency to grab up at edges and stop there. Almost any flat edge of anything 2d-painted you find on my photostream uses this. Its how I make clean edges.

 

I discovered it while making my old Aliens Pulse Rifle . I had done the first coat of the green layer and wanted to put in thin black lines, but was too lazy to design decals for the lines and knew I wasn't good enough to freehand little black detail lines in cleanly. So I tried like, cutting in little lines with my hobby blade. It worked alright as just lines, but the revelation of this technique came when I went to apply the second layer. I tried painting really close to the line edges, and found that my paint sort of pulled itself the rest of the way to the line, but not across the line. I realized I could use it to make the clean bley rectangles lower on the gun, and that was the start. It wasn't until a couple months later that I realized the implications of this--I could use it to make lots of little neat squares, to form digital camo! At the time, of course, I was still unskilled with the blade, and my first use of this as digicamo was literally a turd in Lego form. I've learned since then and, well, let's just say I've improved a little bit.

 

I use this for everything ever. Digital camo, splintermuster camo, boot edges, guides for lines on mods, painting on straps or something, defining edges for anything anywhere. This fig was basically the ultimatum of this technique before I bought sculpting putty.

 

Please, please start using this. Try some digital camo that ISN"T made from sponges. Spend some time on it. With this, you actually have to take the time to design each digicamo shape and decide where each square is going to go. The square size is determined by the skill of the user of this technique, and can go as small as you can carve a square. I understand the appeal of sponging, since its rather quick and requires less effort, but with that you aren't really making digicamo, you're just making little blobs so small that the eye can't tell they're not squares. (That being said, sponging is AWESOME for flecktarn!!) Its good to have both techniques going around. Sponging reliably gives realistically-scaled bits (in terms of a minifig to how big a camo print at their scale would be) every time. I really want to see what everyone does with this though.

 

EDIT: Stamping is not involved at any time in this procedure. You paint up to the lines, the paint drys, and thats it. Sorry about any confusion :P

 

Please use this well, it is the basis of my customization and I am very proud to share it with everyone. If you use it for something special, feel free to add me to the pic, because I want to see what everyone does with this. Thanks! Have fun!

Done