Tag: miniature painting

#oneaday Day 603: Awesome minis painted quick

Today I've been doing something that I haven't done for probably 30 years or so: I have attempted to paint some miniatures. As I alluded to a while back, this is a field where "technology" (for want of a better word?) appears to have come on quite a bit in the years since I last tried it, and I was particularly interested in trying out something called "Speedpaint".

Speedpaint is a formulation of paint that, in contrast to the usual thick matt acrylics, is very thin and semi-transparent. You brush it all over a model and the nature of its formulation means that it works its ways into all the little nooks and crannies by itself and naturally darkens and lightens according to the undulations of the model. In other words, it goes darker when it gets into deep cracks, and creates natural highlights in elevated sections.

I was especially interested in trying out the "Speedpaint Markers", which combine the simplicity of Speedpaint with the straightforward, mess-free approach of using a pen rather than a brush and palette. And for the most part I'm very impressed with the Speedpaint Markers; they're a convenient and easy way to get some colour on to a model, and the Speedpaint within them works exactly how it's supposed to, making it easy to create convincing and realistic effects with just a single coat.

I've been painting some of the furniture from HeroQuest today, as these are fairly large pieces that are, for the most part, relatively straightforward to paint. And in doing so, both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Speedpaint Markers have become apparent.

They're great for covering large areas. Painting one of the door miniatures, the tomb, the tables and the stonework around the fireplace was simplicity itself. The paint did its thing and created some nice shadows and highlights with minimal fuss; I found that it needed just a little more than a single coat to look good, but it's still a very quick way to get something painted.

The weakness of the Markers is that although their tips are relatively fine, they're still a long shot from a proper detail brush, and as such it's difficult to paint very fine details with any great accuracy. This means that it's difficult to, for example, paint the books on the bookshelf miniature, or the little bits and pieces scattered around the alchemist's table.

Thus I have concluded that the best approach, for now, is to have both the Markers available for large, simple areas, and some more conventional brushes, paints and a palette around for more fine detail work. This means that I have spent considerably more on this little experiment than I perhaps initially intended — and part of me, the cynical part, suspects that this is how they "get" you — but will hopefully be able to do a much nicer job once I have some more appropriate bits and pieces.

I've enjoyed what I've tried, though. The results I've had with the Speedpaints today are considerably better than the cack-handed attempts with acrylics I did back when I was in my early teens and didn't really have the right brush for the job. In fact, in retrospect, it was not having the right brush for the job that put me off taking things any further; I got frustrated that I felt it was too difficult, and just sort of gave up.

After today's little experiment, I'm keen to have a proper crack at it though. It'd certainly look very cool to have at least some painted minis on the table the next time we play HeroQuest (which, all being well, will be next weekend).

So I guess I'm Someone Who Paints Miniatures now. I suspected that Someone was always inside me, what with the inherently nerdy nature of the surrounding hobby. I've just come to it a little… late, is all.

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#oneaday Day 584: Paint chase

"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.

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