After having spent the better part of six months doing two units worth of decently-to-extensively kitbashed characters, the entire Court Of the Seven-Headed Serpent Warband(one Wretched, three Yoke Fiends, three Hell Knights, a Sorcerer, Pit Locust, Hunter of the Left-Hand Path, Praetor, Desecrated Saint, and a bonus Sin Eater mercenary), and five custom Night Lords(which were even more kitbashed from the ground up from several kits), as well as five bonus Heretic Troops(not really kitbashed, but still), all painted in the very grimdark style, I needed to take a breather for a bit and do something simpler. (I did use a couple of days to do some extensive color testing for what I wanted to do for the Artillery Witch, where I finally got my colors ready, thanks to a bunch of wraiths, who will be repurposed as colorful AD&D enemies, as well as John Spacemarine, a test model who gets reprimed and painted all sorts of crap.)
Grimdark style is my favorite style to paint in(though my current Heretic army is going to be kitbashed a lot less-the Warwolf will see the most of it, and I have some light modifications done for a few other models already but it's mostly just pre-weathering this time-but I'll be using all the cool oils, effects paints, pigments and enamels as I do), but like anything, I find I can't just do the One Thing, All Day, ALL the time. While 'Eavy Metal doesn't appeal to me(my body rejects edge highlighting like it's a transplanted alien limb), I do like just a nice ol' panting session, I like drybrushing and speedpaints(hell laying down acrylics and washes and *drybrushing* highlights is a whole other story), and I decided to combine both of these for what I'm calling 'a tribute to the old days', and also combining this with some practical painting for what I hope to be that upcoming AD&D 2e game over the fall.
So I decided to do a semi-little 'challenge' for myself as a palette cleanser, but also to practice some stuff that may have fallen out of practice over the past few months(or just to see how far I've come otherwise). No real 'rules' to this, but I mostly was painting Brite Minis(seriously go check these out!), who have a very sorta old-timey Ral Partha feel to them, which of course were the first AD&D minis I ever touched, even though I only slapped paint on a stark handful in the 90s.
I don't have a resin printer(I live in a flat with a family, it's just not feasible, so if I need resin, I order), but these print very, very well on an FDM at .2 and .06 layer lines, with some good filament(and some parameter tweaks.) After priming, they're great, and for AD&D 2e enemies, NPCs, and spare minis if someone wants one for a character, they're about perfect! (I also ordered some metal Reaper minis recently, since I haven't painted metal characters in years, but that'll be another blog post.) Old-school looking, perfect vibe for AD&D, so I think they were about perfect for the semi-challenge/palette cleanser I had in mind. (I did print out a couple of Hero Forge minis I had, too, for fun, and with the new printer settings, they came out pretty good.)
I did go into this with some goals. No numerical goals(like, I had no 'model count limit' or anything, but the idea was to:
-Paint as many models as I could, without reaching 'burnout speed'(as in, paint as many models as I could during the week that was at a pace where I was having fun doing it)
-Practice a few techniques
-Tribute the old nostalgic figures I grew up with
-Practice just...painting faster in general. Not by rushing necessarily, but learning how to better prioritize my brain-stack of tasks needed for the job, which I am kind of bad at, and I think that's why it took me months to do what I did(I procrastinate a LOT)
-All while getting stuff to a nice, table-ready status(with lower-level monsters being much simpler than PCs, bigger monsters, NPCs and so on.)
-Practice coming up with on the fly color schemes without overthinking. I don't mind being excruciating when it comes to certain special models, but I wanted to work on 'just picking stuff that worked.'
And I'll say I think I did all of this! Mostly, I did use a lot of speedpaints(which combined well with the challenge of trying to keep them 'old school' looking), but in doing this I got to practice brush control(speedpaints actually require a steady hand; remember they are translucent paints, and you can't paint over mistakes as easily), as well as my drybrushing, which is actually quite an important part of speedpaints. While you can 'slap-chop' a miniature to table ready status very fast(spray prime, zenithal spray, 1 coat of speedpaints, done), there are methods to getting the base drybrush/underpaint layer done in such a way that you can start doing stuff like doubling up on the drybrushing, using other colors, and so on. (The 'slapchop' technique is really glazing color over grisaille, which has been done for hundreds of years. Hell, even minipainters of the old days did a variant, only they used watercolors-historical wargamers in particular used this from time to time.)
Also practicing blending on a troll, with classic acrylics. (He'll be a level...5-ish enemy. They have 6+6 HD in AD&D 2e but in those days once the mage got the fireball/Melf's Meteors they become a lot more reasonable.)
But all in all I got lots of table-ready minis done and it felt very good to get a load of them done. I wouldn't say they are display pieces for the most part, but importantly they are practical and will be easy to pull out for some AD&D whenever the time is right. Speedpainting is fun and figuring out different combinations of drybrush colors underneath was fun, too. (I didn't go nuts with bases-usually just a prime, speedpaint, overbrush, and done, but for 'better' characters I jammed on a tuft or rock or something. I might be tempted to do a more old-school diorama, though.)
I think it's kinda nice to do little things like this when painting to mess with other styles that you might not if you specialize in one. Like, someone who lives in NMM and volumetric perfection to practice for their Golden Demon may well have some fun doing some grimy grimdark stuff now and again in between. Someone who is used to spending a ton of time on 1 or 2 models might have fun doing lots of easier ones, and so on. In my case as someone who spends months on a couple of units, it was quite fun to go more old-school.
Also it's kinda cool to see what sort of habits I end up leaning on. Besides procrastination and getting distracted, that is. I DID learn that that, indeed, eats up more painting time than I'd like. Having to make choices quickly I think sorta helped focus that a bit.
Here's some pictures of the various minis just sort of posing! They came out in various states of quality. Some depended on the prints(some prints came out rougher, especially in the faces; I had some older filament, and have recently gotten some better stuff and have been tweaking the numbers to get them tighter and tighter), others the color choices, but all in all I think the goal of 'Table Ready AD&D Enemies, Hirelings, Henchmen, and Spare Minis for People Who Might Want Them" is a success.
Also during this time I expanded my Army Painter Speedpaint 2.0 collection more. Unfortunately I am at the point where buying a set doesn't make sense financially; I have over half of the speedpaints, and the medium-size set they have has too many copy colors in it already. I did also grab a few good Citadel Contrast Colors(okay I know they're Warhammer paints now but it's always gonna be Citadel to me), that don't quite have that perfect equivalent. Contrast Paints come in pots and are like 2+ euros more, but they have some fantastic colors(I love Frostheart and Aeldari Emerald, and I grabbed some other goodies that help.) Even when I go back to heavier acrylics, I've been using speedpaints as a supplement, since they are very versatile-glazing, washing, effects, the whole nine.
I also think I learned that swapping around things in between more extensive kitbashes is a good idea. I DO plan on doing the Carcass Front box, especially the Naval Heretics since I have an idea for a frozen Northern variant of them, and this one might be a bit of a big project, depending, so interspersing some metal AD&D minis in the middle of that sounds actually quite nice. I'm not sure of that yet.
Right now I had started the other Heretics, and I'm doing a mix of traditional and speedpaints for them(with enamels and the like.) As I said above, I feel myself able to paint faster(and neater!) having taken this two-week experiment. I kinda suggest folks try it out! I don't agonize AS much at the moment, and I feel like I can come up with cool ideas for them faster as well. I don't necessarily need to paint super-fast, but there is that nice blast of serotonin when you finish a model up in a decent amount of time, and I like the reward button feeling.
Here, I'll even post the WIPs I have of the two Anointed(one is an Avarice-Mammon-based one, a really evil royal, hence the gold and purple, the other is based on Grynewaht, an NPC from FFXIV's Stormblood, who isn't a hell dude, he was just a bit of a dumb antagonist who ended up WAY over his head.)
And yeah, I AM working much faster these days, without rushing. I think doing that speedpaint 'Ral Partha Tribute' challenge somehow helped me a LOT in becoming more productive with stuff!
Anyway, I'll be back showing off a couple more minis! Like, probably when I'm done writing the blog.
