Painting Small and Expensive Plastic People

[Sigil]

I've recently gotten back into painting miniatures after something like a 15 year hiatus, and I figured there's probably enough hobby overlap here that some of the other people here probably also do miniature painting. So, I figured a thread for us to share and talk about minis might be fun.

After a few aborted attempts these two were my first models I actually finished since coming back to the hobby, old 1987 sculpt GW 'Fighters' sculpts for WHFB. I did the one in blue first.

Then, I was in the store buying something for another project I wanted to do, and saw the Ork Gretchin kit for $16 (doesn't get much cheaper than that for 11 models), and it was Orktober so I figured I'd grab it and paint something from it. Big Ed was the result. Big ork head on little grot body.

Then last week I got around to actually painting something I had 3d printed. My father is a big Fallout nerd so I painted this and am going to give it to him for his birthday. Fairly happy with how it turned out, though the green is darker than I'd intended.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Beautiful stuff. I have to say, there's something highly appealing about those square bases of yours. I typically use raised round ones so I can glue washers to the bottom and weigh them down, but I dunno... square looks good. Maybe it's me though, but your paint looks a bit thick in that first set? Even still, it's a really solid job, especially since some of these dudes have eyes. Most of my minis look like faceless anime goons with shading in place of ocular orbs.

A friend of mine is getting into painting this week and I've been telling myself I should get back into it, too. But I should also get back into writing my fucking RPG instead of playing video games, so...

[OgreBattle]

Big 'Ed is wonderfully hideous in a good grotorky way

[Sigil]

Beautiful stuff. I have to say, there's something highly appealing about those square bases of yours. I typically use raised round ones so I can glue washers to the bottom and weigh them down, but I dunno... square looks good.

Warhammer Fantasy used square bases because your were supposed to line up your regiments of little dudes with the bases touching in formations. Nowadays the replacement for WHFB, Age of Sigmar, has moved to round bases like 40k. I felt like the models should stay on their original bases though, considering I don't really plan on actually playing anything with them.

Big 'Ed is wonderfully hideous in a good grotorky way

Haha, thanks. I need to make a "Little Ed" to go with him. Big ol' ork with little grot head.

[Foxwarrior]

I don't know what you're talking about: if you ignore all the costs except the price of ink, these minis were a few cents each.

I need to up my painting game to compete with Sigil...

[Sigil]

Maybe in resin, but have you factored in the cost of the printer into every model you've printed so far

[Foxwarrior]

Hmm, that'd probably add up to, like, $5 per mini then. Or so.

But the price I'm really ignoring is all the time spent sculpting each mini first.

[Koumei]

if you ignore all the costs except the price of ink, these minis were a few cents each.

If you ignore all the costs except the price of soy sauce, eating well on a tiny budget is super easy.

[Foxwarrior]

Depends on how much soy sauce you drink.

[PhoneLobster]

I have decided to participate in this.

Even though I am almost certainly not the sort of person who would just have miniatures they had painted lying around easily at hand for a quick bad photo.

I definitely wouldn't be the kind of person who happens to have one of a dozen (or several) unpainted GW randos lying around to act as a quick bad scale comparison after never having served any other purpose and likely to never serve another purpose again.

Nor is there evidence I'm surprisingly bad at photographing miniatures for someone who does a lot of macro botanic photography.

I would definitely not have fuzzy lochness monster like photographic evidence suggesting that my collection spans multiple factions of multiple games or that I have various and miscellanous fantasy miniatures, or even more than one cabinet full of them.

So since I definitely don't do any of that sort of coloring work as an amateur I can only share a photograph I took of some as yet unreleased coloring work I do as a professional side thing to my real job. Though it is a bit different as coloring work goes because instead of plastic or metal miniatures it's mostly made out of dirt and water and I don't use paint to do the colors.

Edit: and these links will definitely work forever and I won't just get bored of it in five years and decide to free up some online storage space by deleting it all.

[Sigil]

That's a pretty sizable collection. Are those in the first picture Infinity minis? I keep eyeing some of the range, they've got some cool looking models.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

HOLY FUCK THAT CABINET! I wonder how much money went into all that plastic and paint.

[Foxwarrior]

Looks to me like 1-2 gaming laptops of money, by my rough count.

[PhoneLobster]

A lot of them are infinity models, infinity models are (mostly) very pretty, but I'd say definitely use thin layers of paint on them to let their incredible detail shine through. edit: that first model is both forms of a "su-jian", a "transforming" (you just get two models you are expected to swap) robot dude slightly larger than the normal scale. One of their nicer newer models.

As for cost, that is like 30 years worth of accrued purchases, some random free hand me downs, various things I got on sale and also not all the miniatures I have. The whole collection is probably a tiny bit cheaper than you'd estimate but I have no real idea.

And while I don't care for the difference all that much. Most of them are metal not plastic.

[Sigil]

My only reservation about getting any Infinity models is that they're a bit expensive (though they're clearly great looking models that are probably worth it), and if I was getting something a bit more expensive than normal I'd probably actually grab some Solar Auxilia from ForgeWorld first:

I really love the way these guys look.

[PhoneLobster]

The thing about infinity models here is that in Australia they were actual a bit cheap. Something about a good wholesale price for the resellers. Prices have crept up since the original extra low prices, but even now they are still competitive. And anyway. Buy things during sales.

Like this one time, the only time I bought infinity models from an international reseller, they had seemingly decided to get rid of their entire infinity range on clearance and seriously I bought models that were at a MINIMUM 30% off. I bought one of those big robot crab tanks that one faction has just because it was going for like 15 bucks or something stupid instead of the usual hundred or so. Only reason I even found the sale was because I was looking for out of print versions of the mono-bikers and the store sold out of everything within about 2 days.

But even ignoring the lucky clearance sale, many of the other sellers generally have a yearly sale where you can fairly reliably knock off an extra 15% or so, and they are more likely to mark down smaller name brands than GW.

[Koumei]

I need to borrow a phone from a family member. I've shown off my "Hive Fleet Kirby" nids before, but I have a few additions to it (including some Forgeworld things back when FW prices weren't adjusted regionally and thus were about on par with the regular GW ones), there are the Sisters of Battle of course, and some assorted other things like Necrons. Oh, and the Relic Knight stuff.

I also need to get around to assembling and painting my "Totally Not Sisters of Battle" TGG minis, Wrath of Kings stuff, and just painting the minis for Massive Darkness.

I'm really impressed with the use of soil nutrients and sunlight for the gradual blend on that mostly fibre-based mini, PL. Also I love some of the colour schemes I'm seeing in this thread.

[PhoneLobster]

You can't begin to guess how exclusive that lily picture um, might?, be.

Showing that in the wrong place on the internet and I could be dealing with plant ninjas in the middle of the night.

Or at least annoying phone calls day and night.

[Thaluikhain]

I've got the odd zillion models, but my painting skills are non-existent and not even tried on most of them.

Going to create a Gorkamorka mob using only models that existed when the game was around. Which means getting a few Deffkoptas and making them into trucks, and seeing if preachers or old guard work as diggas, I guess.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I uh... don't have the best lighting in my tiny apartment, nor am I a very good painter. But I wanna show off too, fuck it.

I'm probably the most proud of my kobold party from when I played all 4 of them at once in my friend's 5e game. They were a bunch of little rascals and I had fun trying to represent them. You've got a fairly standard party: Urd fighter, Deep Kobold rogue, Deep Kobold cleric of Kurtulmak, and a Dragonwrought sorcerer. It's kind of hard to tell in the picture, but he's got green spots due to his draconic heritage. The Urd's wings were affixed with some green stuff and glue, and the cleric's shield has a gnome's skull with a spear going through it, her holy symbol. I promise that it's the sun that makes them look this washed out.

They were also the first metal minis I painted and the first ones I've ever primed myself. It was quite a fun experiment that I think I should practice more of. Most of my other minis are pre-primed Wizkids stuff that I thought would be good to start with.

Here's some other stuff I feel good enough to take pictures of.

As mentioned earlier, I'm not very good with eyes. The big blonde dude is supposed to have gold eyes, but I couldn't get them to show right. At least the red eyes on my barbarians look cool. Those guys were my experiments in color shading and blending, I accidentally made their skin pitch-black, so it was fun trying to beef it up into something that actually looks like a human skin color. They've even got little potions on their belts.
Oh, the blonde dude's actually a Heroforge mini of my campaign's (RIP) main bad guy and also my experiment in creating my own base out of green stuff. I learned I should buy a fucking rolling pin instead of trying to make tiles by hand like some kind of idiot, and for some reason I had a hell of a time getting the blues to blend properly. I'm not sure why, since my Urd's wings came out exactly how I wanted them to, but this cape was a bitch and a half and I'd already spent 20 hours on the guy so I said 'fuck it, good enough'.

This kind of shit is why I like painting furniture the most. It's hard to fuck up furniture (says the guy who spent 10 hours repainting the same stone altar over and over).

[PhoneLobster]

Those are pretty good, and who is good at eyes anyway?

I've always struggled with eyes because of my shakey hands.

So shakey a group of grown adults has banned me from playing jenga type games in front of them because they find it too high stress to watch.

[Sigil]

My hands shake just a little bit sometimes, especially when I'm tired. This video has a lot of excellent advice for painting with shaky hands/arms, worth a look for sure, his shakes are pretty severe.

[Sigil]

Worked on this guy over the weekend. Not quite finished. Need to do something with the weapon and I want to try out edge highlighting. It's turning out okay, but I'm not quite as fond of the color scheme as I thought I would be.

[OgreBattle]

With the color scheme, I think it's the elbow armor, crotch armor, and upper arm armor blending in with the cloth that throws it off. You could try painting those parts the same blue as the other armor.

[Sigil]

I think you're right. Either that or I should reconsider what color the 'cloth' portions are. Either way, I probably wont repaint this one, I'm just going to try for better results next time.