Miniature Painting

That’s right, It’s February and I’m talking about Christmas. And in a brief moment of secretive foreshadowing, there’s gonna be another Christmas video in the middle of summer, and you’re gonna thank me for it.

So, recently it was Christmas and I got a package in the mail from my daughter. And inside was one of the coolest gifts I’ve ever received. A brand new box of Games Workshop trolls – I mean troggoths.

I would dig having the job tasked with coming up with copyright enforceable names, that seems pretty fun, right? But we all know these are trolls.

Anyway, the trolls are not the cool part of the gift. I mean, they’re awesome sculpts, and when I opened the package I was like ooh! More trolls! Cause I already have this box in the Pile of Opportunity. But there was a note in the box, and my daughter said, in the note – and I’m paraphrasing here – Merry Christmas, Dad. THIS is a gift exchange. I sent you these trolls to paint for me and you send me a set of minis that I’ll paint for you.

Coolest gift ever.

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we see everything as possible content like a good YouTuber.

I did ask my daughter if it was cool that I make a video about her Christmas gift and she was fine with that. C’mon, I’m not a total social media monster. Jeez.

Also, let me mention a couple new things – one, this backdrop. I just wanted to get some contrast between my skin tone and the skin tone wall back there. It’s just a chunk of printed cloth, so if this works okay, I’ll be able to toss up different backgrounds up now and then, and that sounds like fun for me.

And, two, I’d like to thank my patrons. I’m sure they’re wondering why it’s taken so long for me mention them, but as I’ve pointed out in the past I produce these videos weeks in advance – most of the time – so that’s why. Anyway, every one of you dear viewers is much appreciated and I thank my patrons for hitting that tip jar, that is very much appreciated as well. 

So onto these trolls and this week’s painting project. Another cool thing my daughter was okay with was the fact that I had already built and primed my box of trolls, so I didn’t have to do any assembly or prep for this particular project, which is always nice, right?

And as a further bonus, we’re tacking on another couple, small, FFTs onto this video. I’ve never made “water bases” and I’ve got a couple different products I’ve never used and today’s the day to use some of them. A while back I sent this STL file to a buddy of mine who’d just gotten a 3d printer and asked if he’d print up a selection of various sizes. Which he did, and he sent me a bunch. Many thanks, brother, again, much appreciated! 

And also – hey Eryn, it’s CryinMo!

Ah, nothing like inside jokes to alienate an audience, right? At ease! Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. I don’t know where that came from. That’s back from my old military days.

Anyway, two of these trolls are set up on these relief bases, so we’ll see what kinda trouble I can make for myself towards the end of this project.

Oh yeah, here’s the set I sent my kiddo for her to paint. I requested two spears, two bows and of course the bow and baby dragon for the leader. I’m sure Age of Sigmar players just shaking their heads in dismay right about now.

Anyway, as I said, these guys were already primed, so I did a little white dry brush, but as per last month’s painting video, the undercoat is too bright. It’s all good, we’re gonna do the thing we do best – plow ahead, heedless of whatever cliffs may lie in our path.

I also set up a different camera angle from the last time, so we’ll see how this goes.

I kicked off the painting with those trademark bellies on these guys. Using a mix of Citadel Contrast Skeleton Horde and Apothecary white I just wanted to lay down some light shadow and tint the beer guts a bit. 

For the overall look I wanted to do each troll in a different color. My daughter will use these primarily in D&D with Warhammer being a secondary option. In DnD it’s helpful to have multiple figures of the same type, race, whatever, be somewhat differentiated for tracking and targeting purposes. I also didn’t want to just copy the box art. So I went with a blue and a green and an orange for each of the trolls. I guess they’re from the Chromatic Savages tribe, stomping through the swamps of despair with their bright colors warning of their potential lethality. Lethality, lethality. Whatever that word is. They’re bright and deadly right? Kinda like those tiny frogs. After a coat of the primary colors and some haphazard blending along the edges with a wet brush, I doubled up the richness of each color with a deeper version of each shade, thinking the central spine area would be the darkest spot, along with the patches of scales on their legs and the forearm ridges. Blending the edges of the contrast colors while trying not to mess up the light colored bellies was a bit nerve wracking. 

Sometimes just the way contrast paints work is a bit nerve-wracking, for me anyway. You’re always worried about moving fast because of the way they dry and their stellar ability to create coffee stains. I did find that once in a while, if I hadn’t waited too long, I could scrub up the edge of a “coffee stain” with a watered brush and some actual scrubbing. And putting contrast paints down on such large miniatures just increases this overall risk of leaving edges of applied paint to dry too long without blending. But you know, just gotta do the best you can. 

I put some standard dark wood contrast colors down on the weapon hafts and then for these giant axe hammer things, I thought the chiseled rock might be something like obsidian, but I didn’t go for pure black, more of a deep gray with the anticipation of doing some hard edge highlights down the road. The first coat is too light and I eventually come back to double it up with another coat of the same Basilicanum gray.

Now I had to do a little bit of touch up on some of the areas that would be getting different colors so those areas of contrast paint wouldn’t have patches under them and I also painted up the various bones with one of my favorite Citadel paints, Ushabti Bone. 

As I was doing this, I was thinking about something I needed to work on in my mini painting. I have lots of things I need to work on, technique-wise, but I have a tendency to make mental notes that are basically the equivalent of “Oh, I need to practice this, or I gotta get better at that” and then I stick those mental notes on a mental wall and never actually doing the things in question. I’m old enough to quit that stuff, I’m out of excuses. I gotta start consciously trying to address some of these things, right? I was thinking about how I need to consciously work on color scheme contrast. 

For instance, this big carved stone rock thing I thought, hey, this dude is orange … let’s be honest, it looks like he crawled out of a Walmart-sized bag of Cheeto dust – he’s orange so this massive rock over his head should be a cool tone, a cool gray versus a warm gray. And the base he’s on should also lean towards the cooler side of the spectrum. I figured I’d put a bunch of greenery on that base, and eventually I do just that.

Then I threw a Skeleton Horde and gray mix over the bone bits to shade them down and then it was time to knock out the leather straps. At this point I moved away from contrast paints to standard paints and I use a lot of P3 paints, I like their consistency and finish, to me they are very similar to the Citadel paints but a little bit cheaper. But I also like the pots better too, which, I mean, they’re old school Citadel pots right?

This blob of stuff on the back of Blueberry dude’s hammer axe, I couldn’t really tell what it was supposed to be. It probably could have been like heavy moss or something but I decided to paint it up like it was metal slag. 

Then keeping this idea of color contrast in mind, I thought these extra leather bindings would be red on Mr. Blueberry and Green Hornet here and blue on Cheeto-fingers. 

Now Green Hornet’s off-hand weapon is all this vaguely crystalline structure stuff and for whatever reason I kept thinking of rose quartz and rose marble. So, you know, I just slapped down a coat of of this pink contrast color and then some razor sharp edge highlights to try to sell this quartz idea. 

I kept thinking about what color or colors to do these loin cloths in but I eventually just, I just left them gray. I think it actually works in the end, because the trolls themselves are so bright and saturated.

I needed to get some color on the bases and of course since I want to put water down over these, the idea here is swamp. Even though … well, we’ll talk about this swamp idea and my failure to really capture that towards the end.

There’s always more details to pick out, stuff like this rope. I used the same color for the rope on Blueberry’s and Cheeto-fingers’ teeth and all their finger and toenails. I do try to keep in mind what a lot of the good mini painters always say: try to incorporate the same colors here and there to help with an overall unified look. I followed that up with Army Painter Soft Tone for some shading and then highlights’ll come later.

I use these three colors all the time to highlight up a rich red, but I know a lotta folks would say I don’t go bright enough. This is definitely one one of my mental post-it notes. But for now, this is as red as it gets. Blue highlights on this guy’s wrappings came out a lot more gray than blue and I kinda wish I’d pushed the saturation more.

I did some rough highlights on the brown leather details – if there are ever cases for working in sub-assemblies, which you know I dislike – these guys are definitely one of them. Some of this detail was just really difficult to reach and so, you know, we do what we can and we move on.

Got some dry brushing for the big stone head thing and I did a couple of shades, all the way  up to white. I know this isn’t how a lotta folks do this, but I like to put washes down after I dry brush, I just like how the washes smooth a lot of the dry-bushiness texture. I mean sometimes I want that texture and then I won’t put a wash over it. I put down multiple colors of wash to try to mottle the overall color of the stone and I kept thinking I’d like to have some moss growing on this chunk of statue, so I kept that in mind for the basing stage. 

Now it was time to do a bit of highlighting on the faces, again, I didn’t take this nearly far enough and that’s simply because at a certain point, I just don’t know what I’m doing. And also, I’m trying to not take a week per figure here. So just some basic highlighting over the contrast paint and I find often choosing highlight colors to go over contrast paint to be kinda difficult as well. I mean, the contrast paint does a pretty good job in some cases and it looks great, but it definitely looks to me like it does shadow and midtone, but it never does highlights. But then I look at the results and I wonder how I can blend in highlights to match how good the midtones and shadows are, texture-wise, because the contrast dries with basically a better look than I can match. But again, whatever, just moving on.

And now the pimple painting! Yup, this is a fun bit.  Dotted some white back over the Voluptuous Pink and of course there are only like forty-seven missed pimples all over the place, but to be honest, I think if I’d done every single one, these guys might just look like they had the measles or something.

And then the eyes, the worst part of any miniature, for me. Only Green Hornet had a really prominent eyeball, which was nice to paint, the others were just little squinty eyes. I dropped some reddish black into the sockets and normally I just paint eyes white and call it a day, cause I’ve never been good at painting non-stupid looking eyes on miniatures, but as I went in to paint the eyeball white, I was like, hey, maybe just a highlight is enough. Just a microdot. So I added microdots to the other guys’ eyes as well and called it good.

I added a bit of black metal to the axe hammer slag and figured some rust was in order and so added some watery burnt orange for that rust stain effect.

After dry brushing the bases I went in with some various washes to color and darken everything up a bit.

Then it’s time for foliage and basing. Like I mentioned, Cheeto-fingers got the full forest treatment with all kinds of tufts and vines and leafy scatter texture stuff. Lotta glue, both wood glue and watered down PVA, typical stuff, and just more and more layers of texture. I even remembered to put some moss on that chunk of statue.

After all the basing was done I sprayed these guys with a matte coat, Vallejo mecha matte varnish to be precise, this is how I like to finish off all my minis and of course I didn’t want to spray matte on top of the coming water texture.

Now for the cool part. Or the new part anyway. I have three products in the Pile of Opportunity Basing Edition that I’ve never used. I have two part clear resin, I have UV resin and I have a couple of “still water” products. I’ve worked with regular resin in the past quite a bit but not on such a small scale, so I called up one of my oldest buddies who I worked with in the fx industry – he actually never left it, he’s worked for Disney and Laika and all kinds of places – he’s one of those guys who builds an entire engine for a model tank even though the engine is behind miniature grating or engine doors and will never be seen by anyone else. Anyway, I asked him if I should bother with the two part resin and he felt the UV resin would be my best bet. He also told me I should probably do some tests. In like some little disposable containers or something. I promptly ignored that advice. And since I have multiple products I haven’t used before and at least two bases to try things out on, I decided to try the still water on one base and the UV resin on the other. 

Just in general, I think this UV resin stuff is pretty cool, I can see a lot of potential uses for this in the future. One very nice feature of the still water product versus the UV resin is that it self-levels. The UV resin needed some poking and prodding to smear out and fill in gaps. I did use the UV resin in stages, and that worked just fine too. The disadvantage to the still water product is that you can’t really pour it too thick and it needs 24 hours between layers to cure. And it shrinks. Like, a lot. The UV resin cures in about 40 seconds at least at this scale and using a decent little UV flashlight, and having that kind of speed makes it a very attractive choice. At least for small things like this. In fact, the still water is taking so long to do it’s thing, after this first application, which shrunk way down, I’m just dumping a thick layer on it for round two and then I’m going to top it off with the UV resin to finish it up in a couple days. Cause the thick layer literally took a couple days to dry.

Hey, I’m lazy AND impatient. Multi-classing, it’s the way to go.

But as for the “swamp” look, obviously my water effect is perfectly clear and perfectly wrong for swamp. I’ll have to look into adding either transparent paint layers in the future or even submerging fine flock or something to muddy up the overall effect. For now I just like this new little gimmick. And I did try to push in a couple of leaves to have them suspended in the resin and I do like how those turned out.

But there they are, three members of the dreaded Chromatic Savages tribe. There’s definitely additional techniques I’d like to use in the case of water bases in the future. Again like painting transparent colors between layers of resin, maybe adding splashes and ripples, stuff like that. But hey, one new thing at a time. 

So now I just gotta pack these guys up and ship ‘em off and hope my daughter digs ‘em. I’m looking forward to seeing what she sends me in return, snake-lady-wise!

Three more minis done, feels good. 

So, go finish something!

See ya!

You ever hear of Brene Brown? She’s a professor who researches shame and vulnerability. And also a podcaster and author and speaker and all that stuff. In one of her early podcast episodes, she talked about a concept she calls F F T, and we’re gonna chat about that today in conjunction with chopping and slapping some minis. With Contrast paints, not chips, dips, chains, whips.

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we do some things for the first time, even if the results threaten to suck! Cause we’re ballsy that way and we understand risks are necessary for rewards.

All right, I mentioned Brene Brown and her podcast. I’ve listened to exactly two episodes back when she first started it. Not “two” because it’s terrible, quite the contrary actually, I think she’s pretty interesting. But we all know we’re drowning in content and there’s only so much time in a day to dog paddle around and keep our heads above water. 

Anyway, one of these episodes was about the concept she calls F F T. Which stands for First [bleeping] Time. And there’s always a first [bleeping] time, right? Literally for everything. It’s one of those ideas that I sorta stare at and wonder how in the world I could not have realized it on my own, it’s so fundamental and simple, really. But then I realize it’s me I’m talking about and it’s not really surprising at all. 

F F T is an expression I wish I’d heard a long time ago, so I could incorporate it into my emotional thought process. The idea of acknowledging something as just being an F F T can really help you get through what’s most likely gonna be a series of embarrassing failures. 

I mean, learning experiences! What? What? I don’t know. Moving on.

Today’s video has two F F Ts for me.

This is the first time I’ve tried shooting a real mini painting video with a decent camera and lens, and boy, trying something you’ve seen done by real pros

can really open one’s eyes to just how “pro” they are. 

And here I had a whole paragraph about what a particular kind of a pain in the ass shooting miniature painting is but then I saw Ninjon’s video, where basically he says what I was thinking before I could say it.

You have to worry about keeping the mini in frame, keeping it in focus, capturing the most interesting parts of the painting process and you have to actually not screw up the paint job.

Side note, this is the second time in a month this has happened, where I have a notion and then see someone else do it right before me. The day I uploaded my Crystal Scatter terrain video – NOT pachow – and not the day I released the video – uploading day and release day are two different days for this channel – Vincey V released his miniature basing video incorporating the exact same product. 

These are bigger chunks of broken glass. They’re not sharp in any way, ‘cause of the way they’re rolled around and stuff, so there’s no sharp edges you’ll never cut yourself.

The social zeitgeist or global consciousness is incredibly frustrating sometimes. But I guess it can serve as a constant reminder that we are all connected. Either that or I’m in a simulation and the programmer is constantly [bleeping] with me. And I guess this is apparently the f-bomb parade episode.

Anyway, yes, painting minis under a camera is tricky.

And this is my first time – well, technically my second time – I’ve actually tried speed painting. I don’t really like the idea of speed painting even though I really like the idea of the results of speed painting – you know, having a bunch of miniatures completed. This is most likely due to the fact that I rarely paint groups of miniatures as “units”. Since I don’t really play big army games. I typically paint individual miniatures from units for use in DnD or whatever. Or as members of non-unified war bands. And as you’ll see here, I take way too long to do everything, including speed painting. As well as talking on camera. 

I will say, after having done this exercise for this video, I’m kinda on board with the idea of speed painting or group painting as something I’ll continue to do in the future.

And of course, we can no longer use the speed painting nomenclature, we must call it Slap Chop. Yeah. 

How many times you seen that gag now? triple digits? sounds about right

So, props to the YouTuber who appropriated the term, it’s a cool term and now it’s just sorta what we call this process, but I swear this whole “putting transparent paints over a zenithal base coat” is literally the second intended-use case for the entire category of transparent paints. As my typical luck would have it, I saw Goobertown Minis recently mention the actual French term for this technique which has been around for hundreds of years. And Brent makes a particularly excellent and comical point – which is the best kind of point.

Some folks have pointed out that this is pretty much just the French grisaille technique and it’s been around since the 1300s. Now the way I see it, the French had 700 years to convince me to use the word grisaille. And they failed.

I guess at this point I can just Frankenstein my videos out of better YouTubers’ better content. That’ll be my process – come late to the game, regurgitate what others have already done, cut to end credits. That’ll work, right?

Okay, you in the back there, you can put that shank – I mean hobby knife down, I’m getting to the painting. I swear. 

So for this slap chop speed paint experiment, I decided to crack open my Pile of Opportunity – Sci-Fi Edition and paint up some Infinity models. I’ve got a few of these stashed away and I haven’t painted a single one yet. In fact I haven’t really painted any sci-fi genre stuff since I got back into the hobby – but that hasn’t stopped me from collecting any, right? Of course not. C’mon, I’m a good hobbyist.

And another thing that’s probably slightly disappointing for some dear viewers is that while I do have the rule book for Infinity Code One – see? But anyway, I haven’t played it yet and actually collected a lot of my sci-fi stuff with the intention of playing Stargrave, there we go look at this smooth, smooth moves I got going on here with these books and a game called Reality’s Edge, which I have with me right here. This is ridiculous. Anyway, Reality’s Edge is basically a skirmish game version of Shadowrun without the magic and fantasy mashup. 

These Infinity models are really nice, though. I mean, sure, I wish they were high-end injection molded plastic, but building these metal cyberpunk figures took me right back to my initial experience with painting miniatures, like literally the first miniatures I ever painted. Which were Ral Partha Shadowrun miniatures. I can remember my first pots of Tamiya paint, cause that’s the paint I started out with, I didn’t use any thinner, I didn’t use any washes, you know, this was all pre-internet and I was just a terrible Dorito-fingered savage and I had just met a couple new friends at this hobby shop and to be perfectly honest I don’t know why Tamiya was recommended to me as the starting paint anyway. I think it’s because a lot of the customer base there built and painted military aircraft kits and stuff like that. 

Anyway, these Corvus Belli figures kicked me down memory lane and they are really super nice. Highly detailed. Great casts even, mostly full figures with an arm or two to attach, and really clever seam obfuscation. I didn’t have to do much clean up at all. And all this fine detail is both what freaked me out about painting them and what made me think Contrast paints might be perfect to use on ‘em.

Now I always like to paint minis on bases if I can, I always like as few steps as possible, meaning I kinda shy away from working in sub-assemblies. Once in a while it’s unavoidable, but you know, it’s just like when I shoot video, I hate working with green screens cause that means there’s additional work in post. 

I told you: I’m lazy.

So I pulled out one of my boxes from the Pile of Opportunity: Bases Edition – so many editions of the Pile of Opportunity – specifically the “urban” box and I found a few bases that would work for these guys. These bases are from Micro Art Studio, they come in two pieces, the standard base rim and the actual detail insert. I’m not sure what they’re made out of, the material is almost like vinyl or something, they say it’s resin on the company’s site, it’s kinda soft and chewy but still holds detail well. Super easy to carve into and they take paint really well. And superglue works great with it. 

The reason I have so many of these Micro Art Studio bases – and I have quite a few – is because I would buy them in bulk when Miniature Market would have these clearance sales. I’d get these packs of 7 or 10 bases for like three or four bucks, which is just a crazy value. You can still get these from the actual Micro Art Studio site, but you know, full price is a different conversation. In fact, I have a video about doing that sort of thing right here. Again, not Pachow.

Anyway, these miniatures have the sorta standard tabs a lot of metal minis have for either slotted bases or company names or whatever, so I usually trim these down with clippers and an x-acto knife to sort of create organic pins to stick into the bases, just for added strength. So you can see here I kinda messed up some of the Dremelling but you know, it’s not an exact science – at least not on my hobby desk. I don’t sweat this kinda stuff, definitely not for “tabletop quality” paint jobs. You can always cover this kinda thing up with basing materials or whatever. 

I glued up the various arms and weapons and Corvus Belli really does nice design work, each piece had a nice supported fitting area, and I just used super glue and little bit of kicker.

So then I primed ‘em up for this slap chop thing, but I went with a blue primer for the shadow areas and to be perfectly honest I probably didn’t go dark enough. I don’t generally like to go full black for the shadows, to me the transparent paints just don’t work quite right over super dark undercoats, essentially you can’t really see any color when they go over black, but in this particular case, I definitely should have gone a couple shades darker. Then I just dropped a lighter gray on ‘em from the top with the airbrush, and I’m using Stynylrez primers and just sorta mixing up my own colors. I gotta say again, these are really some good-looking miniatures.

On the first figure I attempted, very poorly, to do the Marco Frisoni technique of slap chop, but I would A need to get much much better at painting and B need a much darker undercoat to make that really work. He makes it looks so easy and so cool! And on top of my abilities being way below par, it was also taking a super long time. 

So I ditched that after the first one and went for a standard dry brush. This is definitely a new process for me, this sounds kinda dumb but I don’t think I’m a very good dry brusher. I don’t think I’m very good at dry brushing. I know like dry brushing is sorta the easiest skill to learn in mini painting but I feel like it’s one of those “easy to learn, tough to master” sorta things. But as we all know, practice is what makes us better. And you know who needs a lotta practice. I’m talking about me. I need a lot of practice. Surprise.

I used – oh boy. Somebody’s, somebody’s going to hire me for something, right?

I used the Army Painter brand of Artis Opus knock-off brushes for this, I have some makeup brushes too, I just hadn’t tried these Army Painter brushes out yet, seemed like the perfect time to use ‘em. They’re fine. I think I wish they were like 10% or 20% “softer” but again this is coming from someone who doesn’t have a lot of experience with this technique yet. So maybe they’re perfect and I just gotta develop a feel for ‘em.

Anyway, it’s finally time for some paint.  So let’s talk about color scheme for a second. I’m terrible at coming up with color schemes. Literally terrible. I know about the color wheel and complimentary vs crappy color combinations – although that’s never stopped me before from using crappy color combinations. I just have a hard time visualizing what something is “going” to look like in the real world. It’s kinda weird cause I have what I consider to be a decent imagination but trying to pinpoint something in my mind’s eye that’s going to transition from “artistic vision” to the real world is kinda tough for me. 

I have this issue outside of mini painting, like as an example when I set up for shooting say an interview, often the on camera talent will have a couple of shirts or tops to choose from and I usually have to ask them to put a particular shirt or something on so I can physically see it in the space in order to make a decision. So trying to come up with paint schemes for minis is always frustrating for me. 

And I’ve tried the technique before where you take a photo of the mini and drop it in Photoshop or whatever and like roughly color it, and that kinda helps a little bit but for it to really work for me, I’d have to put in like a lot of time coloring the image to … anyway, the TLDR is I’m not good at picking color schemes. It doesn’t help that a lot of the times when I look at a miniature, especially like a unit like these guys, my initial thought is, well, they’d be all in black. Or maybe some kind of camouflage based on whatever environment they’re assaulting or fighting in. And I also usually steer clear of the box art, I’m not sure why that is. Mostly it’s cause I want to feel like I’m doing my own thing, and then probably a little bit because I know my skill level is so much lower than the box art artists. 

At some point you just gotta plunge ahead, gotta get stuff done, right, so I just got some paints out. The one idea that occurred to me when I saw the sculpts was that their jackets are really cool and I had this image of beaten leather coats. I figured their pants would be black then I realized the coats seemed to be overcoats and they had other coats under the overcoats but now, looking at the box art, which I probably should have done at the beginning, I guess those layers are the same material. I didn’t get that by looking at the actual sculpts so I ended up choosing OD green for the third color. Brown, black and green. Super creative. I guess they’re getting in tousles in the forest or something. Even though they’re cyberpunky. 

Most of the paints I used on these guys are Citadel Contrast paints. Definitely not a sponsor. Now I kinda like painting coloring book style, where I block in the entire figure with base colors before doing details and highlights. To try to get some variance in texture if not color, I went with a regular paint for these extra military style bags they all have slung over their shoulders. 

I typically paint anything that is going to be black or metal with Black Templar Contrast, so I went over all the guns and holsters and armored knee pads with that. Some of the straps – and there are a TON of straps and bandoliers and, more straps, and buckles, and buttons and even more straps – a couple of them stood out so I decided to hit them with a different color but cleaned them up a bit with white to pick them out. And these backpack slash parachute things, I almost went with a rusty orange and I still kinda wish I had. I actually ended up just adding a little blue to the green to add, again, some differentiation. Then there’s all this zipper detail I couldn’t just let alone, so I just went over that stuff with some Black Legion Contrast. 

Now I really wanted a splash of color on these guys and I was scrolling Instagram, you know, like we all do, and I came across zero death painting and I really, really like this person’s Infinity models. These red gun bits are so cool – and of course the weathering is top notch. So you know I just stole that idea and cleaned up the areas I wanted to paint red with white and then went with a mix of these three colors for what I hoped would be a sorta “rusty red”. Definitely far from perfect but the pop of color really looks cool to me. Not as cool as zero death painting by any means but still, better than like all black or gunmetal. I added orange to the end of the rocket launcher just for, again, a little bit of variance. 

And then for their heads, all I could see in my mind was Ghost In The Shell imagery, and so I figured the brain cases would be basically white and I held off on choosing the faceplate color til the very end. I figured I’d want some kind of color on the faceplates so I did clean them up with some white. Again, I kinda wanted to go with orange but … I was too timid to try it. 

Which is nonsense, because I can just paint over it. I mean I still could. There’s just that whole lazy thing, remember. But for brain cases I put down some of the Apothecary White Contrast. And here something happened that I’ve never experienced personally before – the white P3 paint reactivated under the contrast paint. I’ve literally never had paints reactivate, like ever. I’ve used P3 white under Contrast quite a bit. So yeah, pretty strange. 

Anyway, then I moved on to the bases, typically I like doing bases, but since I was quote unquote speed painting, I figured I’d just do something relatively simple and add a few washes. I used some metallics for the cool textures on these prefab bases and messed around with these pipe colors here for a bit and the weird blue I put down on this one is just because the texture reminded me of this industrial blue plastic siding or roofing material I’ve seen before. I think actually the base was intended to be like some kind of terracotta tiles or something. And the washes are always fun cause they’re so easy. Right? Yeah, I’m right. Washes are fun. Cause they’re easy!

I finally decided to just sorta use the box art color on the faceplates and it’s not my favorite, I think I might go back one day and maybe try something else. Probably that orange I keep talking about. Maybe just on the sergeant or whatever the leader’s rank is there. Who am I kidding? I’m never going back to these. There’s way too many other minis for me mess up! I gotta get cracking!

I went in for some highlighting and cleaning up some detail and I tried to keep reminding myself that this was supposed to be a speed paint project. I just simply didn’t know when to stop. Basically I just quit when I realized that I would just keep working on these things for days and days if I didn’t. And that’s not to say they would have come out amazing if I had continued, it just means that I would have spent a lot of time getting a somewhat higher level of mediocrity. There are so many details on these figures that I could probably have spent another week on ‘em. I mean, I didn’t even weather these guys. 

Okay, originally I ended the work there, but I just couldn’t, I couldn’t quite stop. I had to do a little bit of weathering, I just couldn’t get over not having those cool metallic scratches at least on the red parts of the weapons. So off camera I doused those OD green bags with Citadel Athonean Camoshade – Athenian Camoshade? Athonian? I can never remember that one, but anyway you know what I’m talking about, the camoshade, sorta green brown! And then I matte varnished the minis, which is what I as I always do to finish them, and then I went back with the metallics to both touch up the metallic bits that got dulled by the matte spray and then I just did little tiny weathering on the red parts of the weapons. I feel much better. Even though there’s a ton more work that could be done on these guys.

But there they are, the results of my slap chop speed paint exercise. Now because I recorded every single bit of painting (except for the last part), I know exactly how long I spent on them. And it’s a little embarrassing. I spent over ten hours on these four figures, not counting the building and priming phase. But what’s even more embarrassing is had I not made this a specific “speed painting” project, I would probably still be working on them and I’m 100% sure that the results would not have been much better. 

But hey, I painted some miniatures. And despite the uncomfortableness of the camera setup or whatever, I do really enjoy the act of painting. It’s just a cool thing for me. And it’s been at least six months since I’ve painted a miniature. I’m not sure how long a real, “real” speed painting session on a unit of these guys should have taken, my guess is somewhere in the three to four hour range? I don’t know. I guess it really doesn’t matter, maybe speed painting is just like “art” – it’s all subjective.

Anyway, I do think I need to do more exercises with this whole slap chop method and I do think miniatures with a lot of texture and detail benefit from using transparent paints. And I know that you’ve heard that from plenty of places. I am looking forward to painting more Infinity models, they are super nice, again – and also, not sponsored. But, as luck would have it, my next painting project has already been picked out for me. We’ll get to that in next month’s video.

So I guess, uh, go slap or chop something, see what you think of it. Or for those of you that are already knee-deep in dry brushes and transparent paints, definitely let me know how I can improve. 

So … go paint something. Even if it’s your FFT!

See ya!

If painting miniatures is art, so is coloring adult coloring books. Not “adult” as in “not safe for work”, you know the coloring books I’m talking about. This coloring book comparison, I think that’s what a lotta folks in the “art world” might say. And to be honest, they’re probably not a 100% wrong. But you and I both know that’s not quite right either. And it raises this question that seems to hover at the peripheral of our hobby all the time – is mini painting “art”? 

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we chat about all kinds of things related to the tabletop gaming hobby in as roundabout and disorganized a way as possible.

On a recent Trapped Under Plastic podcast Scott the Miniature Maniac and Ninjon briefly discussed this question about whether or not mini painting can be considered fine art. 

[Do you think that mini painting is more technically focused than traditional art? Yes. That’s a big difference. 100%. Right? We’re more preoccupied with that question than the vast majority of fine or artists are?]

This is a common topic that pops up every so often in our hobby space. But, you want the TLDR, right?  Sure, allow me to oblige you: the answer to the question is simply, who cares? That’s facetious but it’s probably also true. Like, why do we care if someone else doesn’t think what we do is art? I suppose the answer to that is because we’re human and we care about how others perceive us. But of course, mini painting IS art. 

So is coloring in coloring books. Let’s not kid ourselves. Creating anything, really, is art. A programmer writing and developing a piece of software, I would argue in a lotta cases, is an artist. But I think we do have this spectrum of art versus craft. Even though, I would argue that craft is also … art. The programmer – and mini painters – are typically working at a much higher level of technical craft than, say, traditional fine artists, like an impressionistic painter or avante garde sculptor, who are working with more conceptual levels of creativity. Don’t get me wrong, fine art artists are definitely gonna throw things at me for saying they work with less “craft” than some other artist. But overall, I kinda feel like fine art lives over here close to this end and mini painting lives somewhere here in the middle.

So, will miniature painting ever be considered “Fine Art”? My guess is that it probably won’t, for esoteric and intangible reasons. Even setting aside the “coloring book” thing and an artist both sculpted and painted a single unique miniature themselves – which certainly happens – there’s still this question of “emotion”, I guess. Let me explain. 

Good art, I think we’d all agree, elicits an enduring and emotional response from a viewer. Or a beholder. Space marines, generally, don’t do that. I mean, other than the enduring and emotional FOMO response. 

I think most of us in the hobby consider mini painting an art of some kind, but just like in any art contest, there are categories within this umbrella term. I don’t necessarily think one category is better than another, just that the categories offer different things to a viewer. Or, or maybe an “experiencer”. ‘Cause there are pieces of art that don’t rely on visuals alone. There can be texture pieces and auditory creations to experience. There’s that phrase, right? Good art “feeds the soul.” Or torments it, sometimes.

So I’ve been thinking about this question for a long time, just, you know, off and on, in the back of my addled brain and it continues to pop up now and then and I don’t think it’s ever gonna go away. A new idea recently occurred to me about what might make art “fine art”. I think there needs to be some level of or component of abstraction in a piece to allow it to function as “fine art”. It’s like the more real or specific a piece gets, the less room for viewer interpretation and so less “fine art” and more “artistic craft”. 

Of course, my thoughts represent a very unlearned opinion and I am truly just making all this up.

Like I’m thinking 3d vs 2d right off the bat removes a level of abstraction, i.e.  a miniature versus a canvas painting. I do think a painted miniature could be considered art by art snobs but I don’t think that miniature would be painted with a traditional mini painting approach, meaning, the approach most of us use on our own miniatures, which is this sort of technical approach towards realism.

There’s this other quality that kind of makes art … art, and that can be the level of effort inherently possessed by a piece. Like Michaelangelo’s David sculpture is a three dimensional sculpture and bizarrely realistic in its details, so definitely not as abstract as other pieces of art, other than it’s singular texture and lack of color, but it’s also carved out of a freakin’ piece of rock! Like it’s bizarre how detailed it is for being made out of a chunk of marble. So at least one thing it makes you feel when you see it is a sense of amazement just at the thought of how it was created. I don’t know about you, but I catch myself thinking about the artist himself, like what was the day like when he was applying his rudimentary chisel to this chunk of rock, what was the air like, what was the workshop like, what noises did he hear in the background, sorta just getting lost in an imagination of history.

Let’s take a look at the Slayer Sword winner from the 2022 Golden Demon contest. This piece is by Chris Clayton and it’s balls-out amazing. I mean, most of the high-end entries in that contest are balls-out amazing, but this one just happened to take the cake. You can stare at this piece for hours I bet and find new details to marvel at, and it truly is mesmerizing. 

Is it fine art? To be honest, I don’t know. I don’t think a fine art gallery would choose to show it necessarily, but I also don’t know if that’s right. Maybe it SHOULD be shown in a gallery. Maybe there should be an art gallery dedicated just to the art of miniature painting. I’m pretty sure there are museums out there that specifically display miniature works, there was definitely one here in Los Angeles at some point, and there are definitely model train museums, but I don’t know of one that’s specifically just for what our hobby considers miniature painting.

In contrast to the David sculpture, the technical achievements and details of Chris’s piece really pin down my focus and attention to this very specific scene being shown to me. Whereas the David statue, because it is monochromatic and hewn from a single piece of stone, there’s just more abstraction there, less technical detail pinning my attention and so some part of my brain is left available to encounter abstract thoughts.

And that might just be the thing too. Our current labelling of “what is art and what is not” might really just be a social construct, some kind of unwritten agreement we’ve all kinda signed onto without thinking about it. Maybe. I bet some people that are way smarter than me would argue that this unseen, inscrutable feeling that directs our consideration of what is art and what is not is something more fundamental to our human existence rather than a contemporary social construct.

Let’s look at this piece by Tom Hugues – apologies if I’ve mispronounced his name. This is a great example to compare to some of the points we just discussed. This miniature was sculpted and painted by Tom. So, he’s created something that absolutely did not exist in any form before he went to work and there’s only one of these in existence. It’s incredibly detailed, it definitely holds my interest, the facial expression is enigmatic and does elicit some emotional response, some interpretation and imagination from the viewer – it seems to do all these things we’re saying fine art does. I still get this feeling though that it isn’t falling into the same category as fine art, or would be collected by snobby “art collectors”. Which is NOT saying it’s in a lesser category, it’s just a different category.  

Side note, most of this fine art collector, art gallery bull[bleep] is just manufactured by wealthy people as ways to keep – or make – more wealth. I’ll drop a link to very interesting video below that has literally nothing to do with tabletop gaming, but is all about the art world and methods of tax write-offs within that world and you might find intriguing.

Back to Tom Hugue’s piece. And Chris Clayton’s. I do find that while I’m captivated by these pieces, a lot of my mental focus is on the details and how they were painted, how they were sculpted, how these visual effects were achieved. My mind is not wandering off into self-reflection or emotional thoughts conjured by the image of these pieces. If I’m honest, I’m marveling more at the technical artistic achievements by these artists than pondering life or other ethereal concepts, which is kind of what I feel “fine art” gears itself toward. 

Here are some pieces of quote unquote fine art that make me feel something, and the “feeling” is coming from somewhere else, almost sort of not attached to the art pieces themselves but still generated by them. There’s something about the miniatures that inspire me to look closer at them, to marvel at how they were made, to inspect their physicality, to directly admire the technical side of the craft, while in contrast these paintings and illustrations are inspiring feelings in me that have no tangible or direct connection to the painting or illustration itself. They cause me to feel emotions that seemingly come out of nowhere, or out of the color of that sky or out of the brush strokes themselves, they cause me to think of other things, other stories, recall scenes from my past, things that are not directly connected to the paintings or illustrations themselves.

And granted, sometimes I’m looking at some of these paintings and I’m envisioning a wider sense of the world that the painting is showing me. Or imagining what’s happening or going on outside of the space constrained within the boundary of the canvas. And I just don’t – I personally don’t get that feeling when I look at miniatures. I don’t, I don’t feel like the miniature is somehow implying to me a wider world or a wider reality that I could explore mentally. And it’s really hard to … I don’t know why that is. I – I really can’t explain it. I feel like the miniatures just make me look at the miniature. And I don’t really imagine much beyond the miniature, because it’s so real, it’s not abstract enough to allow me to wander outside the boundaries of the miniature.

This is all like super esoteric and and touchy-feely and really more about … vague emotional responses than it is anything concrete to actually discuss.

I think we’re running into the answer we’ve been looking for, which is an absolutely intangible and ephemeral answer. Those words almost mean the same thing, I know. Almost. Is mini painting fine art? Maybe. I think it depends on the beholder and whatever the beholder feels is the answer, is the answer.

But we could literally talk about this ’til the sun explodes. I don’t think there is a satisfactory answer, but I do think that the opinions of “fine art” connoisseurs will keep mini painting out of the fine art category for a while. Maybe not forever, who knows.

I don’t know, the more I talk about these things, the wilder and more far out my thinking goes. Sometimes you just gotta stop and call it good for now.

So. Go make some art! See ya!