Painting
I'm a big gaming nerd. This post is mostly for my benefit, but as I feel I owe it to my legion of adoring fans, I am making this a public entry.
I first started painting miniatures sometime in the early 90's, I think around 1991 or '92 when I first stumbled upon Advanced Heroquest. This game came with a little pamphlet called "How to Paint Citadel Miniatures." Within this slim volume I saw the potential for some really cool stuff.
I picked up a starter paint set and a brush or two with my allowance and got down with the paintin'. The learning curve was pretty brutal, mostly because I tried to do everything at once, rather than starting with basic techniques and working up from there to perfect my craft. For example, the "How to Paint" guide had a section on ink-washes for adding depth and shading to a figure. Well, I didn't have any inks, but I figured, hey, add a little black to the base color, thin with water and hey, that's just as good, right? Well, if you know what you're doing, that can be a viable technique. When you're just starting out, not so much. My first efforts were pretty damn awful. However, the process itself was a lot of fun, and I could see the potential for vast improvement. So I kept painting.
Here's an example of some of my earliest work. OK, the Orc in the middle was from a later period. But this is the best (and only) photo I have of any really old stuff.
Of course, this became something of an obsession as I kept at it, and I ended up picking up several more paints, inks, specialty brushes and of course, more miniatures. This led to playing more games, like Warhammer and 40k, which led to even MOAR minis, and a whole lotta painting to do. I somehow ended up choosing "horde" armies for these games and thus I developed a lot of speed-painting skills. That is to say, maximizing efficiency when painting up large numbers of uniform troopers. The downside to this was that I ended up neglecting the finer points of painting, sacrificing detail for speed - I wanted to get a painted army on the table and when you've got 40 dudes in a unit of troops that mostly end up dying as cannon-fodder, there's not much incentive to paint them beyond a passable "table-top" standard. Yeah.
During college painting and gaming with miniatures took a backseat to White-Wolf and IL gaming; I just didn't have the time, energy and money to sink into the hobby.
I got back into painting during my stint in the Bay Area. My friend Eric taught me a number of valuable new techniques and pretty much reinvigorated my interest in the hobby aspect of gaming. Eric taught me three techniques which I use to this day:
1. Undercoat with Black. ALWAYS BLACK. This simple revelation vastly improved the look of my finished figures and is just freakin' useful in so many ways. Building up colors over a black base is a linear process - start with the darkest shade and work up. I greatly prefer this to starting with a mid-range base color, shading, then highlighting. Undercoating with black also makes black-lining incredibly easy. I find it much, much easier to paint up to a line than to paint the line itself.
2. Layering. For almost everything except metal metallics (more on this later) and the occasional glaze I despise using inks. Layering as an alternative to ink washes for shading rules my painting world. Eric is a master of this technique and his teachings greatly inspired me.
3. Work on One Color At a Time. Previously, my painting process was to lay down a mid-range base-coat on every area of the model, shade areas that needed shading with inks, then dry-brush highlights. Once I graduated to layering, I learned that I can acheive much better results by painting one color block at a time, starting with the largest/most prominent areas and working down to the details. The process here is to start with a dark base and gradually layer up with progressively lighter shades.
OK, there's one more thing that I learned from Eric. Paint mixing. Layering pretty much requires a greater range of colors than one can typically get straight out of the bottle. Eric taught me how to lighten dark colors with a lighter shade of the same color to get a good, graduated spectrum.
After moving back to LA, I tried really hard to get all my 40k orks painted, using the techniques I'd learned from Eric. I got decent results, but it's really demoralizing when a beautifully painted unit of 20+ greenskins gets wiped off the board before getting to sink their choppas into the enemy. This was a deficiency of the game I was playing with my miniatures, but since I'm a gamer first and a hobbyist second, I just didn't (and still mostly don't) see the point of painting miniatures for display purposes only. I have the utmost respect for painters who do this, and there are some amazing painters out there, but for me personally, I derive the greatest pleasure from plunking a finely painted fig on the table and watching with glee as it crushes the enemy, seeing them driven before it and hearing the lamentations of their women. Fuck yeah.
I had almost given up on playing miniatures games until I was introduced to Warmachine. I'd been dissatisfied with Games Workshop games for quite a while, but until Warmachine (and the rest of Privateer Press' products) there were no alternatives that offered the same production quality. Basically, GW had the best miniatures, by far, and despite being a gamer first, I'm not going to paint a shitty fig for the sake of a game. Hell, I almost said "fuck it" and entertained thoughts of collecting pre-painted D&D minis. They at least had a good game to go with them and while the sculpts and paintjobs were nowhere near as good as I would like, they're relatively cheap and require zero effort to put on the table and play. Plus, D&D is a good game. But I digress.
So, Warmachine. Wow. Thems some badass miniatures. My game-dealer Justin pushed Warmachine on me with honeyed terms like "balanced game-play" and "low start-up cost" and, perhaps most appealing "giant robots." I picked up the core rulebook, picked my faction (Khador) and, in a weak moment of Comic Con related geek-spending, dropped a considerable chunk of change on about 3x more minis than I actually needed to start playing.
The minis arrived, and holy fucking shit, thems some nice minis. I mean, the pictures in the book looked good, I ranked them roughly on par with Games Workshop's Citadel miniatures in terms of sculpt quality (which sold me on that big first order), but out of the box... well, what can I say that won't sound like the plaintive ejaculations of a rabid fanboi? Let's just say I was pleased with the quality of the figs.
I've really gotten off topic here. The subject of this long-ass entry was painting. So back to that. The purpose of all that Warmachine wanking was to establish that the combination of a good rule-set for the game and high-quality sculpts for the minatures really amped me up to get back into painting. This time, it's SRS BIZNESS.
Several factors contributed to my resolution to paint my Warmachine figures to a higher standard than I'd ever acheived before. First, the number of models in a standard Warmachine force is substantially smaller than that required for Warhammer or 40k. For example, the minimum "effective" (I use this term loosely) size for an Ork unit is 20 models. Most Warmachine units consist of six models. The largest possible unit is 13 models. Given that you can field a respectable force with one or two units, and less than half a dozen specialty and support pieces, you can get to playing with around 15-20 models. Having less models to paint definitely helps forstall the inevitable painting fatigue that can set in when tackling a large number of models. Combine that with the fact that the sculpts within a given unit vary enought to keep things interesting and you're in for a more pleasant painting experience.
Oh, at this point it may be worth noting that I refuse to play with unpainted miniatures. This stance is primarily based in aesthetics, but also owes to the IRREFUTABLE FACT that painted miniatures perform better on the battlefield. TRUFAX.
Anyway, I've added a slew of techniques to my repertoire over the last year. I'm getting tired of expository writing so let's get into some lists. This will be divided into two segments: modeling and painting.
Modeling
1. Filing. Warmachine minis are all metal, meaning there are mold-lines from where the pieces were cast. Micro files are employed to remove the "seams" and generally clean-up the surfaces of the model.
2. Washing. No, not inks, like actual washing with soap and water. I use an old toothbrush and regular bar-soap to scrub my figures before gluing them together. This removes any lingering grease from the casting process, and also clears out metal-shavings that hide in the cracks after filing.
3. Pinning. Pin-vise + micro-drill bits + brass-rod. Drill holes into the surfaces to be joined (for example, in the shoulder socket and arm piece). Cut a tiny piece of brass rod and glue this into the holes, thereby significantly strengthening the bond between parts. Time consuming, yes. Worth it. Oh yeah. Nothing's worse than charging the enemy and having your arm (or worse, your head) fall off. Plus superglue discolors paint, so gluing stuff back on can damage the paintjob.
4. Sculpting Putty. Greenstuff. Werd. Using putty to fill gaps and smooth joints where parts fit together goes a long way toward making a piece look truly impressive, rather than like a bunch of glued-together parts. Up to this point I've dabbled only slightly in sculpting true detail, but I'm itching to some heavy conversion and maybe even "scratch-build" a miniature.
I've picked up a set of sculpting tools, which, for the scale Warmachine figures are based on, are essentially dental picks. Protip: coating the working end of the tool with lipgloss helps prevent the putty from sticking to the tool.
Painting:
1. Blending. A step up from layering, blending fades one color into another by feathering the edge of one layer into another. This is definitely an advanced technique, and one that I am still mastering. The results are visually stunning though, and well worth it.
2. Glazing. Using thinned down coats of brightly pigmented paint really makes colors pop. Especially when working over a black undercoat, glazes can bring out the vibrancy of colors that might otherwise get subdued by the dark base.
3. Metallic Metals. You know what works way, way better than trying to get a specific color of metal? Starting with a dark silverish color, highlighting up to pure, bright silver, then glazing the surface with the final color you want. Thinning down inks with water work great for this.
4. Non-Metallic Metals. I'm still pretty newbish with this, but the general idea is to use flat colors to simulate reflective metals by using the appropriate hues to trick the eye into seeing this effect. Pretty much like how a computer monitor can display a color that looks like chrome while only using greyscale.
4. Paint Additives. The most important aspect of all of the aforementioned painting techniques is getting the right consistency of paint for the job. To this end, matte medium works wonders. Essentially it evens out the consistency of paint out of the bottle, facilitates mixing colors and extends the life of paint pots by allowing you to use less of a given color out of the pot to create a larger volume of paint on the pallet. Matte medium also helps take out the shine of inks and aids in evening out the tone of paints.
Many of my recent efforts can be seen here. If the clamor from my legion of adoring fans is loud enough I may post more pics of stuff I've done since then.
So there you go. I'm on the verge of acquiring an entirely new set of paints and a slew of additives to further supplement my painting arsenal. My Spring bonus cannot get here fast enough...
I take great joy in painting miniatures. Playing Warmachine with my friends and random strangers at the local game store is a blast. Especially when someone says "wow, nice painting!" I realize that painting miniatures is only vaguely artistic and only nominally creative, but I find it to be a very rewarding craft, the depth and nuance of which enthrall and entertain me.
I first started painting miniatures sometime in the early 90's, I think around 1991 or '92 when I first stumbled upon Advanced Heroquest. This game came with a little pamphlet called "How to Paint Citadel Miniatures." Within this slim volume I saw the potential for some really cool stuff.
I picked up a starter paint set and a brush or two with my allowance and got down with the paintin'. The learning curve was pretty brutal, mostly because I tried to do everything at once, rather than starting with basic techniques and working up from there to perfect my craft. For example, the "How to Paint" guide had a section on ink-washes for adding depth and shading to a figure. Well, I didn't have any inks, but I figured, hey, add a little black to the base color, thin with water and hey, that's just as good, right? Well, if you know what you're doing, that can be a viable technique. When you're just starting out, not so much. My first efforts were pretty damn awful. However, the process itself was a lot of fun, and I could see the potential for vast improvement. So I kept painting.
Here's an example of some of my earliest work. OK, the Orc in the middle was from a later period. But this is the best (and only) photo I have of any really old stuff.
Of course, this became something of an obsession as I kept at it, and I ended up picking up several more paints, inks, specialty brushes and of course, more miniatures. This led to playing more games, like Warhammer and 40k, which led to even MOAR minis, and a whole lotta painting to do. I somehow ended up choosing "horde" armies for these games and thus I developed a lot of speed-painting skills. That is to say, maximizing efficiency when painting up large numbers of uniform troopers. The downside to this was that I ended up neglecting the finer points of painting, sacrificing detail for speed - I wanted to get a painted army on the table and when you've got 40 dudes in a unit of troops that mostly end up dying as cannon-fodder, there's not much incentive to paint them beyond a passable "table-top" standard. Yeah.
During college painting and gaming with miniatures took a backseat to White-Wolf and IL gaming; I just didn't have the time, energy and money to sink into the hobby.
I got back into painting during my stint in the Bay Area. My friend Eric taught me a number of valuable new techniques and pretty much reinvigorated my interest in the hobby aspect of gaming. Eric taught me three techniques which I use to this day:
1. Undercoat with Black. ALWAYS BLACK. This simple revelation vastly improved the look of my finished figures and is just freakin' useful in so many ways. Building up colors over a black base is a linear process - start with the darkest shade and work up. I greatly prefer this to starting with a mid-range base color, shading, then highlighting. Undercoating with black also makes black-lining incredibly easy. I find it much, much easier to paint up to a line than to paint the line itself.
2. Layering. For almost everything except metal metallics (more on this later) and the occasional glaze I despise using inks. Layering as an alternative to ink washes for shading rules my painting world. Eric is a master of this technique and his teachings greatly inspired me.
3. Work on One Color At a Time. Previously, my painting process was to lay down a mid-range base-coat on every area of the model, shade areas that needed shading with inks, then dry-brush highlights. Once I graduated to layering, I learned that I can acheive much better results by painting one color block at a time, starting with the largest/most prominent areas and working down to the details. The process here is to start with a dark base and gradually layer up with progressively lighter shades.
OK, there's one more thing that I learned from Eric. Paint mixing. Layering pretty much requires a greater range of colors than one can typically get straight out of the bottle. Eric taught me how to lighten dark colors with a lighter shade of the same color to get a good, graduated spectrum.
After moving back to LA, I tried really hard to get all my 40k orks painted, using the techniques I'd learned from Eric. I got decent results, but it's really demoralizing when a beautifully painted unit of 20+ greenskins gets wiped off the board before getting to sink their choppas into the enemy. This was a deficiency of the game I was playing with my miniatures, but since I'm a gamer first and a hobbyist second, I just didn't (and still mostly don't) see the point of painting miniatures for display purposes only. I have the utmost respect for painters who do this, and there are some amazing painters out there, but for me personally, I derive the greatest pleasure from plunking a finely painted fig on the table and watching with glee as it crushes the enemy, seeing them driven before it and hearing the lamentations of their women. Fuck yeah.
I had almost given up on playing miniatures games until I was introduced to Warmachine. I'd been dissatisfied with Games Workshop games for quite a while, but until Warmachine (and the rest of Privateer Press' products) there were no alternatives that offered the same production quality. Basically, GW had the best miniatures, by far, and despite being a gamer first, I'm not going to paint a shitty fig for the sake of a game. Hell, I almost said "fuck it" and entertained thoughts of collecting pre-painted D&D minis. They at least had a good game to go with them and while the sculpts and paintjobs were nowhere near as good as I would like, they're relatively cheap and require zero effort to put on the table and play. Plus, D&D is a good game. But I digress.
So, Warmachine. Wow. Thems some badass miniatures. My game-dealer Justin pushed Warmachine on me with honeyed terms like "balanced game-play" and "low start-up cost" and, perhaps most appealing "giant robots." I picked up the core rulebook, picked my faction (Khador) and, in a weak moment of Comic Con related geek-spending, dropped a considerable chunk of change on about 3x more minis than I actually needed to start playing.
The minis arrived, and holy fucking shit, thems some nice minis. I mean, the pictures in the book looked good, I ranked them roughly on par with Games Workshop's Citadel miniatures in terms of sculpt quality (which sold me on that big first order), but out of the box... well, what can I say that won't sound like the plaintive ejaculations of a rabid fanboi? Let's just say I was pleased with the quality of the figs.
I've really gotten off topic here. The subject of this long-ass entry was painting. So back to that. The purpose of all that Warmachine wanking was to establish that the combination of a good rule-set for the game and high-quality sculpts for the minatures really amped me up to get back into painting. This time, it's SRS BIZNESS.
Several factors contributed to my resolution to paint my Warmachine figures to a higher standard than I'd ever acheived before. First, the number of models in a standard Warmachine force is substantially smaller than that required for Warhammer or 40k. For example, the minimum "effective" (I use this term loosely) size for an Ork unit is 20 models. Most Warmachine units consist of six models. The largest possible unit is 13 models. Given that you can field a respectable force with one or two units, and less than half a dozen specialty and support pieces, you can get to playing with around 15-20 models. Having less models to paint definitely helps forstall the inevitable painting fatigue that can set in when tackling a large number of models. Combine that with the fact that the sculpts within a given unit vary enought to keep things interesting and you're in for a more pleasant painting experience.
Oh, at this point it may be worth noting that I refuse to play with unpainted miniatures. This stance is primarily based in aesthetics, but also owes to the IRREFUTABLE FACT that painted miniatures perform better on the battlefield. TRUFAX.
Anyway, I've added a slew of techniques to my repertoire over the last year. I'm getting tired of expository writing so let's get into some lists. This will be divided into two segments: modeling and painting.
Modeling
1. Filing. Warmachine minis are all metal, meaning there are mold-lines from where the pieces were cast. Micro files are employed to remove the "seams" and generally clean-up the surfaces of the model.
2. Washing. No, not inks, like actual washing with soap and water. I use an old toothbrush and regular bar-soap to scrub my figures before gluing them together. This removes any lingering grease from the casting process, and also clears out metal-shavings that hide in the cracks after filing.
3. Pinning. Pin-vise + micro-drill bits + brass-rod. Drill holes into the surfaces to be joined (for example, in the shoulder socket and arm piece). Cut a tiny piece of brass rod and glue this into the holes, thereby significantly strengthening the bond between parts. Time consuming, yes. Worth it. Oh yeah. Nothing's worse than charging the enemy and having your arm (or worse, your head) fall off. Plus superglue discolors paint, so gluing stuff back on can damage the paintjob.
4. Sculpting Putty. Greenstuff. Werd. Using putty to fill gaps and smooth joints where parts fit together goes a long way toward making a piece look truly impressive, rather than like a bunch of glued-together parts. Up to this point I've dabbled only slightly in sculpting true detail, but I'm itching to some heavy conversion and maybe even "scratch-build" a miniature.
I've picked up a set of sculpting tools, which, for the scale Warmachine figures are based on, are essentially dental picks. Protip: coating the working end of the tool with lipgloss helps prevent the putty from sticking to the tool.
Painting:
1. Blending. A step up from layering, blending fades one color into another by feathering the edge of one layer into another. This is definitely an advanced technique, and one that I am still mastering. The results are visually stunning though, and well worth it.
2. Glazing. Using thinned down coats of brightly pigmented paint really makes colors pop. Especially when working over a black undercoat, glazes can bring out the vibrancy of colors that might otherwise get subdued by the dark base.
3. Metallic Metals. You know what works way, way better than trying to get a specific color of metal? Starting with a dark silverish color, highlighting up to pure, bright silver, then glazing the surface with the final color you want. Thinning down inks with water work great for this.
4. Non-Metallic Metals. I'm still pretty newbish with this, but the general idea is to use flat colors to simulate reflective metals by using the appropriate hues to trick the eye into seeing this effect. Pretty much like how a computer monitor can display a color that looks like chrome while only using greyscale.
4. Paint Additives. The most important aspect of all of the aforementioned painting techniques is getting the right consistency of paint for the job. To this end, matte medium works wonders. Essentially it evens out the consistency of paint out of the bottle, facilitates mixing colors and extends the life of paint pots by allowing you to use less of a given color out of the pot to create a larger volume of paint on the pallet. Matte medium also helps take out the shine of inks and aids in evening out the tone of paints.
Many of my recent efforts can be seen here. If the clamor from my legion of adoring fans is loud enough I may post more pics of stuff I've done since then.
So there you go. I'm on the verge of acquiring an entirely new set of paints and a slew of additives to further supplement my painting arsenal. My Spring bonus cannot get here fast enough...
I take great joy in painting miniatures. Playing Warmachine with my friends and random strangers at the local game store is a blast. Especially when someone says "wow, nice painting!" I realize that painting miniatures is only vaguely artistic and only nominally creative, but I find it to be a very rewarding craft, the depth and nuance of which enthrall and entertain me.