"Are you going to paint them?" Andie asked, looking at the wealth of miniatures in the big-box HeroQuest set that arrived today.
"Probably not," I said. "I don't know how."
This probably isn't quite accurate — as Andie pointed out, the how of painting something is pretty bloody obvious. But what I meant by that was I have no idea how to do it in such a way that it doesn't look absolute shite.
Now, granted, I am basing this on my previous attempts to do this, some 30+ years ago, when I had a Citadel Miniatures starter paint set and a single brush that was, frankly, woefully inaccurate for the job at hand. The results were, as you might expect, Not Very Good — not least because I only ever really got as far as doing base colours, and never got into doing highlights and shadows. I always got hung up on the how of those bits — how do you know which bits need highlights and shadows? (Obviously, you shine a light on it, and put shadows in the bits that have shadows in them, and lighter bits on the bits that have light on them — I realise that now.)
With this in mind, I've been pondering whether I should try again. And I was surprised and pleased to discover that miniature painting technology has, unsurprisingly, moved on quite considerably in the intervening 30+ years since I last attempted it.
I'm especially interested in some curious little gizmos called Speedpaint Markers by a company called The Army Painter. This is, in turn, a spinoff of a type of paint this company creates called Speedpaint, which purports to do all the highlighting and shadowing for you to a certain extent. It does this through a particularly blended paint, whose properties mean that when it gets into cavities it takes on a darker tone, while on flatter, more raised areas it has a lighter tone, and on everything in between it has a… well, kind of "normal" tone, whatever that means for the specific colour you're using. It's a different sort of idea to acrylic-based paint, which is what I had previously experimented with, and looks like being a very beginner-friendly approach to painting minis.
The Markers take things a step further. Rather than requiring a specialist brush, palette and other equipment, they're a little brush-pen hybrid that delivers the paint right onto the miniature without any other equipment required. Obviously you still need to prime them beforehand, but that's simple enough that even I can do it.
I'm tempted to give them a try. It's a bit of money to get a decent starter set of colours (and, annoyingly, the one thing the "starter set" of markers lacks is a regular flesh tone) but if it really is as easy as it looks to use these things, I might finally be able to enjoy something that has, to date, eluded me.
I dunno. I'll think about it. But it would be cool to have painted minis for HeroQuest.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.