Intro

I pushed my self to be a bit more brave and interactive than I usually am, and decided to enter a painting contest. Full disclosure: this was not a high stakes project. One Page Rules hosts a monthly painting contest for that months releases. The pictures are due shortly before the end of the month, so this isn’t a long term project to sink hundreds of hours in. It’s something fun I could do to push my self with a deadline and that is something I tend to avoid. I never put pressure on my self, why not try something new?

The model I chose was a combined Dwarf Guild miner, from the January release, naturally. I already have almost a whole unit of warriors finished, with a hero, so it seemed like a good subject; I have familiarity with the models and I already have an established color theme I enjoy. The miners are a bit more challenging than the armored warriors, with more surfaces to simulate than armor and guns. I was very excited, I’ve been consistently pushing my self to get better and better with each model and this felt like a great opportunity to flex my skills a bit and put some stuff I’ve learned all together.

Colors and ways

My existing army already had a color scheme, dark red with yellow or gold highlights. The miner would be a bit different, as they are not armor plated. There were a few parts that looked like they should be the same dark red from my previous models, but otherwise I had to take a different tact to make sure it fit in with the rest of my units. I still used the same base colors, plus all the skin tone and some cloth. The first of either I’ve done in a while, I put aside my Frostgrave minis to start a Dwarf Guild army and haven’t painted much in the way of natural textures.

My paint collection is not as vast as I’d like, so I figured I’d just throw everything I’ve got at it. They’re all various acrylics I knew they could work well together. Since I really did want to push my self, I opted to go for a simple black prime with no zenithal. I use Badger Stynylrez black primer through an airbrush. I collected all the base colors I knew I wanted,Scale 75 colors, a few flesh tones from Vallejo and the refractive green in the Vallejo Model Color range to name a few.

This is far more organized than usual for me. I’m a fan of making it up as I go, and grabbing whatever paint occurs to me might work for that particular part of the mini. Pre-planning shades and highlights is wizardry to me, so I never really try. I can’t say I was totally succesful, and I didn’t plan entire gradients, but I tried to stick to the pre-planned scheme.

Blue Collar work

I can’t do really fancy stuff yet, I can’t do NMM consistently yet and OSL of any kind is still something I can ruin a model with. So this was going to be old fashioned if I wanted to push my self. I don’t have any good tricks up my sleeve, this would just be layer after layer. Moving from base layers all the way to glazing and tinting, really pushing my understanding of color theory and light and shadow.

I am not good at following through, especially when something is boring or gets difficult. Great character traits I know, but I’m working on it. Getting smooth base layers and trusting the early process was very hard. It was boring as all get out, starting with thin layers to avoid any clumping or texture meant it took at least 2-3 layers of anything to see progress for a while. Eventually though, I did get a feel for building up to highlights or shadows with the colors I was using and it took off a bit.

It was still very patient work, but once I hit the point where I felt confident with my colors it was much more natural.

Where is the devil?

I think painting detail is a fan favorite with mini painting, at least that’s the vibe I get online. It’s very theraputic to focus on the minutia and watch your mini come to life with all the small details. My miner had about as many details as I can handle. After losing a week of time to work on my entry when I lost my keys in the stupidest way possible, I don’t think I would have done a very good job if there had been many more little things to paint.

I planned for TMM right off the bat, and I’m so happy I did. I can’t do NMM on demand, sometimes I pull it off and other times it just gets worse the more I try to smooth it out. I have a few different silver/steel metallic paints, so I was very happy with the variety I managed to fake.

At this point, I was really out of time and it was too bad. I tried to give the base as much love as I could, I tried the whole time to imagine that someone would actually hold the mini and check that you gave equal attention to everything. Sadly, I could not and did not. I used glue and sand, and a few different colors to quickly put together an acceptable base. It wasn’t nearly as nice as I’d hoped, but it worked.

Just happy to be nominated

I simply didn’t give my self enough time, despite really doing my best to print and prime ASAP when I got the January release. Spending an entire week walking home from work and searching everywhere for my keys was just a complete kick in the butt. I finished late at night, far too blurry eyed and tired. I wasn’t really happy with it, I could have pushed a lot more contrast and some big things like the pick-axe and the base just didn’t have anywhere near the detail they should have.

I sat on this until after the contest was judged, I didn’t really think I’d win but I would rather have included that in the original story. I did not win, as I had assumed. Really, it wasn’t about winning at all, though I would have loved some nice brushes. I wanted to push my self and I thought outside pressure would help. It really did, I didn’t linger on any one thing too long and I also really put the work in. Both of those are wins in my book.

I do feel I learned quite a bit forcing my self to put everything together with the intention of doing well. Normally I use every model as an experiment, I don’t usually paint with the pure intention of doing a very good job. It turns out I learned quite a bit. When I stopped shitting on my self and giving the project some time to mature, and I really did do better than I thought I could do even if I’m not happy with the output.

I intend to enter another contest soon, hopefully when I don’t lose my keys and cost my self a day. I’d also like to do a bit more interesting model. I love my Dwarf Guild units, but on hindsight there just wasn’t as much there as one would want to show off the model and their painting skills. Overall I’m very glad I did it, and happy with my effort if not the output.