Tag Archive for Hobby Paint

Lowering Your Standards

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Once upon a time I worked for a miniature company you may have heard of called Games Workshop. Games Workshop would hold two annual tournaments. One was for staff and the other for the public. Both tournaments required all models be completely painted in order to be played. I would typically spend several months ahead of time planning and meticulously painting each model to the best of my ability in order to win the “Best Painted Army” award, which I was fortunate to achieve a couple of times.

Fast forward to today. I no longer seem to have the patience to paint models to showcase or competition level. Now, I find it quite frustrating if a single model takes me longer than two painting sessions to complete or a unit to take more than four painting sessions to complete. I can still achieve pretty decent results but the quality suffers a bit. If you’re not painting for competition and just want to get your models on the table then you may consider lowering your standards. This article may help you out as it’s all about painting to tabletop quality.

 

This lovely female painter is lowering her standards a bit.

This lovely female painter is lowering her standards a bit.

…Exploding On The Highway Like a Slug From a .45

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Speed Painting 101

A common question I receive from friends is “How do you paint so fast?”.

It’s not uncommon for me to hammer out a full 50+ point army in roughly a month’s time.  How do I do this?  It’s likely a combination of experience and technique.  I’ll just run down some quick pointers and then there’s a 52 min video of me painting a Bull Snapper model from start to finish.

 

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Wear a smock or something if you’re going to speed paint like this guy!

Blending In

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Wet Blending Master Class

There tends to be a natural progression when it comes to miniature painting that almost everyone follows.  You first learn how to base coat a model, keeping it clean and all your colours inside the lines like a kindergarten kid learns how to stay inside the lines in their colouring book.  Then you progress to drybrushing which provides a nice quick and easy way to add some depth to your painting.  The next progression tends to be layering, where you lay down your shadows first then progressively build up layers of lighter tones in increasingly  smaller areas until you have a gradation from shade to base colour to highlight.  The next level in the painting technique progression is what this article covers: Blending.

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Blending in. Yeah… Not so much.

Converging on tables!

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So my goal, as stated last week, was to get my shiny new Deathbot Battle Box assembled, primed and painted in time to get some games at the battle box level in Thursday night at Heroes World.  After enlisting the help of a friend and mentor, as well as the dastardly enabler who got me into this whole tabletop miniatures fiasco in the first place, to help me paint my shiny new toys I managed over the course of the evenings Monday through Wednesday to get paint on models, and to succeed at my goal!

Convergence of Cyriss Battle Box

Convergence of Cyriss Battle Box

Puppy with which to Pound!

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More painting with Ragnarok, posted by me because teaching a painter how to sign into a blog and post his own article is proving to be a challenge!! – NB

Saturday the 25th of May, a not so local (but still very awesome) hobby shop, The Hobby Kingdom,  ran their annual Most Extreme Annihilation Challenge event (which is loads of fun!). This event awards style points for many things like amazing army themes (including the option to come in costume to match your themed army), or extra points for an epic way of slaying an opponent’s Warbeast/Warjack. The style points I was most interested in were the painting points! Nothing like the anticipation of a fun event to get one out of a 6 month painting funk, like most hobbyists I go through painting phases. And I usually need a push to get out of a funk phase. Thanks to the MEAC2013 I was inspired to paint a Warlock I have wanted to get to for a long time! Kaya the Moonhunter and her trusted companion Laris. This blog will take us on a journey of how I got the pair of beautiful models painted.

Just a quick disclaimer before we get going. I have not yet updated my paint collection to the new GW colours so all the paint “names” I will be using in this blog will all be the old and outdated names. Please refer to this page for the GW paint name conversion chart:

CITADEL CONVERSION CHART

So let’s get started ….

With Laris:
After cleaning and assembling Laris I primed him using GW Chaos Black Primer.

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Tools of the Trade

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Have you ever heard the expression, “It’s a poor craftsman that blames his tools”?  This may be true of many trades but it does not apply to miniature painting.  In fact I believe that quality tools can make one’s miniatures better than what they could be with poorly maintained or mediocre brushes and other tools we work with.  This article aims to provide you with the details and hopefully impart some knowledge on the more commonly used tools of our trade.