Hia i'm BBP and i really like painting ships, so much so that sometimes I spend more than half of the time building a ship painting it. In this guide I aim to give you tips that will make your ships look much better, and have fun while doing it. It's also important to note that everyone has a different style and there is no "right" way to paint, and that this guide only goes over my areas of expertise.
Part 1: The shape of your ship
Painting your ship can already start in the building phase. Making the ship's shape interesting and nice to look at is a main part of painting. This is usually best done by putting armour, structure and operatioal parts in patterns across your ship. I mostly do this using armour and structure, as using stuff like reactors to simply make your ship look greener isn't exactly the best idea in terms of efficiency. Note that example 2 looks way more interesting than example 1, and allows for many more patterns because of the number of wedges it uses.
example 1
example 2
The way I did this was draw 2 lines of armour; one thicker than the other, then made one shorter. Then I deleted the inside of the wider one, added jagged-looking wedges in a hazardous pattern, making sure there was still enough connections so I can rest easy that it won't break apart from a cannon hitting in just the wrong place. I do this in small chunks so I can be sure i didn't make any mistakes. An easy way to make your armour interesting is by having thin chunks, connected by structure in enough places to not risk it falling off. Now that you've learned how to make your armour look nice, let's talk about paint.
Part 2: The type of paint
There is an almost infinite number of ways to paint a ship. What you are trying to do is find one you like, then put it onto your ship in as interesting a way as possible. How do you do this? There's many ways you can go about it, and here's a few to get you started:
Method 1: Theming
You can create what I like to call a "theme", which can be roughly described as a pattern or selection of patterns that link to eachother, a reference (eg. a character from something) or a general idea. Here's some examples, but there is many more:
In this example i only used plain01, plane02, plain03 and plain04:
In this I used round shapes for the decals high and a variety of shapes on low decals:
And this example is Megumin's hat (I build a ship based on Megumin who is a character from the anime Konosuba, and this is the armour on the tip):
A theme can be as simple or complex as you want, as long as you stay consistant throughout the entire ship, or atleast a part of it (you can try to paint something with a personal paint theme to practice if you feel like it would help)
Method 2: Freestyle
It expains itself doesn't it? Freestyling is like painting with a theme without a theme. It can be good practice and is fun, but can be chaotic if you're a little too abstract. Here's an example:
Method 3: Shaping
Painting your ship in regards to its most noticable curves or spikes can be hard if it's a box, which is why it can be a good idea to plan your ship's armour or internals to help with this. For instance, this example has pointy bits, so I painted pointy bits on it to enhance the feel of jaggedness:
Method 4: Filling it in
This one's a little harder to explain, so i'll give examples instead. Let's take a part of a ship that i've augmented according to part 1, which i then added some random diagonal lines to.
I then added patterns on the second layer, still letting the viewer see the background. Hlaf blocks can work suprisingly well like this, as do curves and wedges.
Method 5: Bigbrain combinationizing
Personally, I do all of the above. I recommend getting used to each one of them before doing this however, as if you don't fully understand them the paint ends up not looking as good or cool as it could.
Part 2: How to pick the colours?
Colours are a very subjective thing, so what I will say is this: Pick colours that compliment eachother. For example colours close together on the colour wheel but further apart on the "hue box" can work well, but so can the opposite. It'd be hard to fully detail this in text, so have a look on youtube as there's quite a few videos on colour theory and using it to your aesthetic advantage.
Part 4: General tips on painting.
1: Paint is a thing that you improve in, very few start off really good. I've been painting my ships for 3 years now, and i'm still improving.
2: Being an artist helps, but you can still do amazing paints by simply doing it often. If you paint most of your ships, you'll get better really fast.
3: This is probably the most important note here, and that is don't rush it. I've found that even rushing your paint a little can decrease the quality a ton, start off slow and when you get in the rhythm just keep going.
I really hope this helped, I spent an entire day on this and the editor (Brengun) spent much longer.
If you need any help with anything in this guide just ask, good luck and have fun painting!
