Miniatures: 'The Hobby', 'Plastic Crack', and other tiny things
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After a decent hiatus, I've been getting back into painting miniatures lately. After posting in WAYDT over the weekend, @goosehd (at least) seemed interested. And a thread charting my progress might keep me accountable and ensure I see a project through to completion.
So I thought I'd kick off a thread for people who are into miniatures, modelling, 'The Hobby', whatever you want to call it.
I'm thinking that this thread will be more for discussion around the making and showing off of our - well, maybe just mine, we'll see - tiny toys and statuary, rather than for things like battle reports on any games we've played lately, but let's see how it goes. (And, of course, there's few things in life more beautiful than a well painted army in all its glory facing off against another on the tabletop.)
So get out your Size 000 brush and join me in the posts below. I'll follow up with a post about what I'm working on at the moment later today.
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@EdH I had the same phase as @AdamJ , only mine kinda revived during the long lockdown of covid when I had very little else to do. Now I'm just left with a mountain of a mixture completed, semi finished and still boxed 40K haha
going to keep a close eye on this thread and may post some of my own amateurish efforts..
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Back in my early teens I had a mad obsession with war hammer both the original and 40k stuff never into the game as such but just the painting of the figures ( I think they may have still been lead them but not sure ) making the scenery pieces and land scapes also
I haven’t painted one in over almost 30 years and never were up to the stage of the workers in the shop that I used to frequent with my dad
Even now there is a war hammer shop here in Adelaide that every weekend I walk past and always look at the figures
Always think is it a white base or a black base they have used before the colour paint has been applied
My son Jacob has shown interest also but he’s only 6 so the technique of tiny figure painting is a few years off yet i think
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I'm currently working on an Adeptus Custodes army, hoping to get into playing Warhammer 40k around the time the tenth edition of the game launches next month. Maybe that's a bit ambitious, but we'll see.
The Adeptus Custodes are the honour guard of the Emperor of Mankind. They're the very best of humanity's forces in the 41st millennium, able to shrug off most incoming damage, and hitting like a fully loaded truck. Due to the sheer amount of resources required to invest in their training and maintenance, not to mention the overwhelming majority of potential recruits that perish in the gruelling training and genetic modifications required to produce a qualified Custodes, they are limited to only some 10,000 warriors, despite the immeasurable vastness of humanity's total population across the galaxy.
As befits the Emperor's custodians and guardians, they wear a shit tonne of gold.
What this means for me, a guy tackling his first full army, is that (a) you don't need that many of them to field an army; (b) co it's cheaper to buy the models to build an army; and (c) the colour scheme is pretty basic, so I should be able to get them on the table reasonably quickly.
Here's the army, all assembled apart from a few heads, before they'd been primed:
This might be a bit meaningless unless you're into the game of Warhammer 40k, but in case anyone is interested and/or wants to look up the models, the army consists of:
7x Vertus Praetor Jetbikes, one as a Captain
3x Custodes in Allarus Terminator armour, one as a Captain
15x Custodian Guard, 7 with swords and shields, 7 with spears, one made up as a Vexillus (with a shield). One each of the swords and spears are made up as Shield Captains.
5x Custodian Wardens, one as a captain, one as a Vexillus.
1x Blade Champion.
1x Trajan Valoris, the general/leader of this faction.A couple of week's ago, I got them all primed up (the bikes are on a different shelf):
I then spent a while comparing different gold paints. Here are some test models (testing on my spare space marines, rather than on the Custodes):
The 'official' colour scheme from Games Workshop calls for the gold on the far right in the above image. But this looks nothing like gold. It's too orange in my opinion. The one in the middle had too much of a green hue. The one on the left I was pretty happy with, as it came out the same colour as my wedding ring (which is a white gold ring, now showing a bit of patina). I quite liked the hue, and how it reacted to the light, and that they'd be a bit different to anyone else's Custodes. The only problem with the one on the left was that it was a bit of a custom mix of paints, and I wasn't paying close enough attention to what I was putting in the pot during my experiments. So once I ran out, I'd have had a job recreating the exact mix again, which could have messed up coherence across the army if I ever added more models to it and needed to make up the same paint again. On further reflection, I also thought that this gold, while realistic, didn't have enough of a fantasy/sci-fi vibe. My mate thought it looked more like copper or brass - despite it not looking like either when I showed him samples of those metals, and compared to my wedding ring - and I realised that there is an expectation among painters/hobbyists/wargamers that 'gold' looks a bit larger than life.
After a bit more experimentation - and delivery of a new paint set last week - I settled on a mix of 4:1 Glittering Gold and Dragon's Gold from Two Thin Coats. (Two Thin Coats is a new paint range on the market from Duncan Rhodes, a former Games Workshop YouTube personality and 'how to' painting guy, who has gone his own way and now does painting tutorials, YouTube and hobby products. The paints are great so far.) This mix produces a nice yellow gold with a subtle orangey/red hue.
So I spent yesterday finalising that mix and blasting the armour with my airbrush. (I still need to do the jetbikes - they're going to need me to procure some thin dowels I can stick up them so that I can spray the underside at the same time.) Here's what the army is looking like now:
Next step will be giving the armour a wash with a fleshtone wash, before moving on to highlight the armour. Hopefully then I'll be able to do the other details on the miniatures without any errant brushstrokes hitting the armour.
I think I'll pick one of the models to photograph more closely from here on out for the purposes of charting progress here.
Take the dive...
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@Brian I hear Warhammer is very expensive in Australia and NZ - even after accounting for shipping they're still something like 50% more expensive than a straight currency conversion would suggest they should be! If you think of getting back into it, I have heard that hobbyists in Australasia tend to get mates in the UK to buy things for them, take the sprues out of the packaging, and post them that way to avoid this mark-up and taxes. Just FYI!
Also, the miniatures now are made in plastic, which can be so much more detailed than the old pewter models. I love them.
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@Ross Me too, I got back into it during lockdown. With all that disposable income, I fell into it hard. I started painting warbands from GW's spinoff game Underworlds. Each warband was only 3-7 models or so, and were very varied, so I could get through them at a fair clip and try a new painting technique with each one. I've never tried doing an army before now. I might show off some of the ones I did. What army were you into?
@AdamJ Would be interesting to see what's in your loft. Some of the older sets can still fetch a decent amount if you catch the enthusiasts at the right moment on eBay!
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@EdH when I got back into it I started off just foraying into Killteam, which is basically the lines of the 40k equivalent of warband. But then I got pulled into Horus Heresy - and that was a mistake, that was a game which needed a large investment of time and money, especially as most of the miniatures were forge world only. For Killteam I had Tempestus Scions and for HH I collected Iron Warriors - which is one of those strange twists of fate as it turns out given where I've ended up career wise.
'Iron within - Iron without' would make a green motto for IH, but we might get sued
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@EdH amazing too see this and all the work and dedication you’ve put in this! Thanks for the share man!
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@EdH How much time goes into each figure and is it something you do for a hour at a time or do you dedicate blocks of time towards? How much is by airbrush versus brush?
I've always had an interest in N-scale model railroading and at some point want to do a complete track layout with town and scenery. I have the space, but now finding the time is the challenge.
"I don't give a shit what anyone else is doing, we will do what is best for us and our customers" - Giles P. :)
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@goosehd said in Miniatures: 'The Hobby', 'Plastic Crack', and other tiny things:
I've always had an interest in N-scale model railroading and at some point want to do a complete track layout with town and scenery. I have the space, but now finding the time is the challenge.
So if you do come to the party in Hamburg, we will not actually see you there unless we drag you out of here? https://www.miniatur-wunderland.com/
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@goosehd I like to be able to sit a do it for a couple of hours at a time, aiming to get the same step done on all the models all at once to minimise the amount of kit I need to have out on my desk, and to ensure I’m being consistent. It depends on what step I’m at with the painting to how long I’ll need. As it’s my first army I’m ‘batch painting’, so doing the same step to every model, but for a single model I would be a lot more free-form in what I chose to tackle.
Saying that, I couldn’t get through applying a wash - really runny paint with a low surface tension that gets sucked into the recesses and corners of the model and defines all the small details - when I sat down this week and still have 9 or so to do, so that’s about 30 minutes more work. I should get pictures of that step up over the weekend.
Then I’ll be dry-brushing the armour with a bright yellow gold to buff up the spots where the wash dulled down the flat and raised surfaces. I reckon that’s about 3-4 hours work, but I’m a v slow and careful painter. Depending on how that turns out, i may then apply some more precise highlights with a normal brush, but those will be very select whatever happens so shouldn’t take too long to do that. Then the armour should be done and I think I’ll move on to the cloaks and capes, etc.
How much time is spent with the airbrush and how much with the regular brush depends entirely on the model and paint scheme, but generally you can cover a lot of ground with an airbrush quite quickly. If I was doing vehicles I’d probably use an airbrush for getting the main colour established and doing some shading on the large, flat panels. You tend to always spend more time with a normal brush whatever happens though, as that’s then used for all the small details and refining everything.
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@EdH This may be a silly question, but considering that it represents an army, should there not be battle damage to each figure that separates each of them and makes each one of them unique?
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@goosehd if I feel like doing that, it will be something I add on at the end. But as these guys are supposed to be the very elite of the elite, I’m not sure they’d have that much and I’m tempted to leave them nice and clean.
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Finally got the wash done on all the armour. Before and after photo below. I hope you can see the recesses are more defined. (There’s a reason washing the model is often referred to as talent in a pot.)
The wash has dulled the armour though, so next up is a dry brush with a yellow gold to make the raised details pop and bring back the shine on the flat areas.
