As I've pointed out on the blog, I had ventured into mini painting again after like, 30+ years.
Back in the day, during the dark ages of the 1990s, I slapped some hobby acrylics onto Ral Partha minis(mostly goblins or orcs)-it was the style at the time. Those old minis had some hella nice charm, though; if you've ever seen them, they looked like this:
(the goblins were particularly awesome.)
Back then, we had no idea what we were doing. Most of us just sorta put paint on them and made pretty colors and then put them into little dioramas, usually small plastic boxes with fake plants and stuff. Real 'hardcore' painters back in those days used enamels more often than not(which wasn't something starter teenagers were good with, due to the spirits involved and such. Give a smoking teen a bunch of spirits and I'll give you a kitchen on fire.)
It didn't really last long and I only ever did a small handful of them, but it was fun, in any case. I had decided to get properly, decently into mini painting again at some point, and after a couple years of saying I would, I grabbed a handful of contrast paints and regular acrylics and messed with some rough 3D prints back in September.
These were a couple of the better ones that I did then(the Tonberry is going to be getting some lighting, now that I know how to better do that.) A few were painted on draft-level minis, so you can't really even see too much detail. I'll mostly show off the ones that have some semblance of detail to the printed models:
I was going for that Ral Partha look for the dwarf, and it seemed to hit! (He actually got some more shading done later, but I don't have a better pic at the moment.) I also did a black-metal barbarian:
Finally, I did a frost demon(one of THE first I started with), and my ruffian rogue/wrestler from Pathfinder. Again, just playing around with stuff and seeing how shit works:
For the first bunch I was using a mix of speedpaints/contrast paints and acrylics. Just trying to feel things out. Not clean or anything, but I felt like "Okay, I feel like I can do this. I can make miniatures that look like tabletop mans, and if you stand far enough away from them, they kinda work." It was a nice boost to the morale, at least. And they DID look better than those old Ral Partha goblins(I have no pics of them, it was done in The Nineties), where I had no idea about thinning paint first.
October came around and after painting at least a little bit every day, I managed to come up with these models:
I felt myself getting better! I swapped almost completely over to acrylics by this point. I use speed/contrast still here and there, but more for experimenting, effects, or if I literally just want to Paint Something Really Fast. I wanted to get more practice with highlights, shadows, and general brush control, and I felt like acrylics did that better. The Goblin Warchief came from Army Painter's Most Wanted acrylic set; the first paint set I picked up to beef out the collecction. Definitely a worthy purchase. I also had fun messing with some UV resin on the Death Knight fellow along with some fluro paints. All told a good month of improvement!
In comes November. I feel like again the daily(well, almost, I started to feel a little ill a couple times and had to minimize it) painting has paid off. Been still tinkering with other ways of doing models, and I think this month I managed to do a few that I was *particularly* proud of instead of just 'Okay, I don't dislike this!' The Beholder and the old orc I feel like turned out pretty good all told. I had a lot of fun playing with effects on the Beholder. Also painted up the first of my box of Slaves to Darkness chaos mans, who do not follow any sort of color scheme(I'll be using them for a variety of tabletop things.) I can't find a finished pic of that one for some reason and he's in one of my storage boxes at the moment. The beholder is a 'plague' variant and I was trying to get him weeping and vomiting toxic plague ooze.
(It should be noted that these aren't *all* of the figures I painted during these times, but I'm picking what I feel like turned out the best of the lot.)
December rolls around! Now I've been painting for 2 solid months and some change by this point. I started now to get a little more on the dark side, experimenting more with weathering, grime, and the like. I'm trying to figure out what style I like a lot. This is also when I painted the Chaos warrior in the style of 1349's Massive Cauldron of Chaos! In addition, I started the Blood/Frost/Unholy trio(which would be finished in January.) I also did a bit of an amusing Christmas-themed piece, a Dark Elf and a 'Tied in Bronze Chains' themed piece, which was based on Rebel Extravaganza(an album that I've gone into detail about several times and will infodump about it at any given moment.) I admit that last one I'd have wanted to turn out better, but I'll get a larger model(the smaller one lacked some chain detail, and I definitely overdid it on some of the effects.) But, still, pretty happy!
(Note: Large picutre dump here, since it includes an extra pic or two playing with glowy stuffs.) Also messed with more UV Resin for the Frost knight to try to get him more icy! Also-also, started to mess with NMM, on both the Unholy knight's axe and the Elf Warrior's sword. I do want to practice this more! And, well, still getting more into stuff like rust, corrosion and so on.
Whew. And finally that brings us to January. To challenge myself, I decided to paint up an undead frost giant from Nolzur's(very weird to paint on, the material, that is, not my favorite but the model looks cool), using only the paints and effects in the John Blanche sets, this way I had to figure out how to do some of the stuff with limited effects(only Grim Rust, two speedpaints, and three washes, which to be fair is a lot, but without my blood and other rust effects, along with the rest, it's somewhat challenging; also, no straight up black or white. The Darkness very dark blue, and Ivory White I had, though.) Also I did the Blood Knight, going more grimdark trying to make his constantly-blood-weeping armor look sticky, messy and corroded. Finally, I did another grimdark, rusted and corrupt style fella just recently; just a dude who I might use as a proxy Hellknight, though I am getting a set of Court models soon so I might not have to.
And from here, working on more! I'd like to keep practicing a variety of styles. More colorful volumetric stuff, classic 'neat and tidy' painting, double-slapchop(which I really liked when I saw), working with oils/enamels and the really nasty corroded effects, a bit of speedpainting and so on. I think after this amount of time I am still finding my style. Which seems to be a variety; for fantasy, I lean toward nastier stuff, except for dwarves, orcs and goblins/kobolds, which for some reason I like doing Ral Partha style, no, I dunno why either. Sci-fi I like a cleaner style. Trench Crusade I want looking as nasty as possible. Guess we'll see where I end up! I like to think that I have improved over the months. I've had, again, other models here and there, some successful, some not as much, some in the middle, but I will keep trying to do more every day.
I might come back in another 3 months and we'll take a six-month look at where I'm at, and then maybe six after that for the 1 year anniversary! (I'll blog about stuff until then, though.)
