So, here are some photos of some of the miniatures I’ve been painting.
I used a technique called the “dip method” and you can see that the red-skirted army dude ended up with a blob of varnish stuck to his sword arm. I will watch that more carefully, that means I didn’t fling enough varnish off the mini after dunking it. I didn’t even notice that until I took the photo. It’s not nearly as noticeable with the actual minis.
These are at what used to be called “24mm scale” which was the original role playing game scale since that makes a 24mm mini more or less equal to an average height human where 1″ equals 6 feet (sometimes called 1/72 scale). Modern RPG has experienced mini scale creep and the current standard for games like D&D, HeroClicks, WarHammer and others is actually 30mm, so these are actually 20% smaller than the modern standard (which is likely why I was able to buy about 400 minis for such a cheap price) which is quite noticeable. I intend to mount them on thick bases to try to minimize the obvious size differences when using them in actual games, but I am worried the size difference will be distracting.
Still, I’ve learned a ton about mini painting. If I had sets of 30mm miniatures, I think it would feel like painting giants after painting all these.
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Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackLook very nice.
Thanks… I’ve pretty much finished painting four sets of minis, and have done most of the painting on the remaining six sets. I am now working one group at a time to complete them instead of one color at a time. I’ve found that doesn’t really add that much time to the effort, and staying on the same set of minis until I am finished with them tends to produce better results since I get very used to the poses as I go from color to color.
I still need to assemble the swords and shields for two of the armies and I have to paint the beards on the dwarves, an effort I am find somewhat intimidating. I need to get more proficient at the dunking technique, on these test cases there are a couple of places where the varnish pooled too much and ruined some of the detail it is supposed to highlight. I guess I’ll learn by doing…
And I need to glue all of them down to the wooden bases and then glue that to the foam bottom for each one… still some work to do. But coming along nicely I think.
Hard to see the detail, but what I see looks okay.
I can’t get too glowing since, as you know, I have some significant experience both in evaluating (actually judging) and painting minis. When next you come down south, I’ll dig some of mine out and we’ll compare relative paint jobs. I used to really enjoy painting minis – although I never did employ the method you describe.
Well, this was an effort to paint hundreds at once. I know they won’t win any contests. But I do think they came out pretty well considering I spent about seven minutes per mini painting them.
Drax, as a Christmas gift a few years ago you sent me a couple of your painted minis. I have used them for inspiration.
Up until now my mini painting has been much like my mini making, it has been entirely a practical endeavor, with the purpose of having usable miniatures to represent the many NPCs that populate our role playing games. Lately I have begun to look more into the actual aesthetics of miniatures, both in the sculpting and the painting. As a result, and because I now have a pretty decent collection to pull from, I am now going to start spending some actual time and effort in both areas to produce nice-looking results. I am a bit embarrassed by my own efforts so far.
In all truth, the above shown paint jobs and the other 362 minis I just finished painting using the same technique, are by far the best looking paint jobs I’ve done on any minis other than the beholder heads I linked before. And these were done in a mass-produced process. So they are better looking because I used better techniques to achieve the result.
But these techniques are themselves self-limiting and designed to speed up mass painting of miniatures. The varnish dunking technique alone is an example of a shortcut to replace the use of three or four shades of colors with dry-brushing on top of that. As part of this effort I did watch a few Youtube video tutorials for miniature painting, so I learned quite a bit about the process of painting to get high-quality results. I just haven’t yet put most of those techniques to use. Except for dry brushing. I did use quite a bit of dry brushing on these minis, and that alone was probably worth the effort since until now my dry brush attempts had been laughably inept. But after dry-brushing entire sets of soldiers, I did, in fact, learn how to dry brush. And I also learned what a powerful technique dry brushing is.
For example, on several of the miniatures I just blasted through at warp speed, there were lots of fine details that I ignored. Those details were things like teeth, necklaces, wrist bands, clothing texture, eyes, skin texture, hands, … well, you get the idea. If I were workign on one miniature with the intention to make it as nice looking as possible, just the use of dry brushing alone would tease out most of those details and make them stand out like the sculptor intended. Using base coats and two shades of each color would provide a much more three-dimensional look, and when combined with dry brushing would provide very sharp reflection highlights as well.
And the tutorials showed other techniques besides dry brushing. One technique I haven’t even tried yet is sometimes called a “wash” where you take a very dilute ink and brush it over an area (like a cloak) where the ink will settle into the recesses and folds providing a very natural looking gradation of shading from the lighter shades on the “hills” to the darker shades in the “valleys.” This is one thing the varnish technique attempts to replicate, but varnish is thick and gooey and doesn’t dry out like the ink does, leaving globs of hardened varnish which obscure fine details that the ink wash would actually accentuate.
There are other techniques, and I am itching to try them on a mini I just bought the other day. But that will be for another time, and when I finish it, I will post photos of it too.
The wash technique would seem to be tailor-made for the process you used. It brings out a ton of detail for very little effort. I used it to relative success in a couple of armies (one looks like giant insects and the other an army of Terminators).
Washing brings out the valleys; dry brushing brings out the ridges. You can use both to great success with very little effort.
The folks who were giving me advice actually warned me against using a wash saying that trying to use a wash on this many minis would be more trouble than it was worth and the varnish would provide more reliable and consistent results, even if it was of a lesser eventual quality. I dunno, I’ve never done a wash, but the varnish was giving me pretty good results so I just stuck with it. I will probably try a wash on my next effort.
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