Painted Miniature counts

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Originally Posted by Lord Pyre

Blood for the Blood God is good fun. Lasts forever too since you generally don't use much at a time!

I've been painting on and off for probably close to 12 years or so. One of the best decisions I ever made was tossing my craft paints and picking up Vallejo. Decisions like this obviously vary person to person and depends on your goal as a painter though. If you want to speed paint everything and just have your table not be gray, go for whatever's cheapest. If you want to enhance your skills and make models look as good as you can, then get some dedicated hobby paints. Like I said my favorite is Vallejo, but it doesn't really matter what paint you get, as most of the bigger brands are great quality, they just might behave differently from each other, which is something that practice and time would easily help. I also have some P3 and Citadel paints (Citadel shades are fantastic, especially).

I use the Citadel black and white spray primers, those are leagues above any other spray primers I've tried. I also use Gesso as a brush on primer in winter occasionally, but I don't like how thick it ends up being.

(Oh, and that 50 count you gave me is just for this year, if that wasn't obvious. I couldn't even guess how many in my lifetime )

I'm thinking of switching to Vallejo, I've used Citadel but it's too expensive for how inconsistent the paints are. For example, yesterday I bought a dry paint that I was planning on using on my Spellweaver last night. When I opened it, there was no moisture in the bottle at all and it's unusable. To be fair, buying dry paints is a waste since you can just drybrush with a base paint anyway but they were all out of that color.

I've had probably 4-5 unusable paints from citadel and I think they are $8 a pop. Not to mention the pots they come in suck compared to Vallejo and Army painters droppers. I managed to finish the mini for the most part last night but it isn't quite where I want it. Also need to go to the beach and collect some sand for the base.

[TREX]

I was going to add. Anyone is super welcome to post pics of their finished minis here. It helps get excited to paint more. I need to either steal my wifes phone or photography camera to take pics of mine. Im a mobile equipment mechanic that works in the field and am always crawling around forklifts, cranes, loaders, skidsteers, etc and have beaten up my phones camera lens something terrible. I plan on posting mine in my mods and paints thread. Most of those in that thread have been repainted and my newer work is much better. @Brunaks That sucks about bottles like that. Every now and then I get a crap can of spray primer that wont come out of the can or blows the paint out in chunks. Ive learned to spray towards a piece of card board until I know its going to work ok.

[Lord Pyre]

Oh you can definitely make craft pains work just fine, lots of examples of people doing so. Just in my experience, it's much more time consuming and frustrating getting the same result with craft vs hobby paint. My skill and speed felt like it skyrocketed once I upgraded. Same with brushes, you can use crappy cheap ones, but a nicer one feels SO much easier to use.

Citadel pots suck. I had a few way back when. Honestly half the reason I started with Vallejo was the dropper bottles, those things are so much nicer and I don't understand why all paint lines don't use them.

Also I hate the look of contrast paints. I know they've help a ton of people get into painting, but it for ones feels likes a shortcut to me, probably builds bad habits, and looks splotchy and makes you lose all control. But again, if you just want to speed paint or make things looks table top worthy, that's great for you! But I think they're a hindrance to building your personal skill as a painter.

Just finished these guys this afternoon. No full repaints here, just quick touch ups for C3G characters. So they're not anything I'm terribly proud of. But they turned out well.

[Ninja Status]

I've used Citadel since my first repaint, though the quality has always been there for me the price is a bit high for such a small canister. I've also had success with Pathfinder paints, cheaper than Citadel.

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Originally Posted by Lord Pyre

Oh you can definitely make craft pains work just fine, lots of examples of people doing so. Just in my experience, it's much more time consuming and frustrating getting the same result with craft vs hobby paint. My skill and speed felt like it skyrocketed once I upgraded. Same with brushes, you can use crappy cheap ones, but a nicer one feels SO much easier to use.

Citadel pots suck. I had a few way back when. Honestly half the reason I started with Vallejo was the dropper bottles, those things are so much nicer and I don't understand why all paint lines don't use them.

Also I hate the look of contrast paints. I know they've help a ton of people get into painting, but it for ones feels likes a shortcut to me, probably builds bad habits, and looks splotchy and makes you lose all control. But again, if you just want to speed paint or make things looks table top worthy, that's great for you! But I think they're a hindrance to building your personal skill as a painter.

Just finished these guys this afternoon. No full repaints here, just quick touch ups for C3G characters. So they're not anything I'm terribly proud of. But they turned out well.

Those look great! I've been thinking about pulling the trigger on some unpainted X-Men Heroclix that are at my game shop. 5.50 a piece seems like a pretty good deal.

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Painted my Orchid spell weaver, 3 DnD skeletons and 3 DnD wolves bringing my total to 42 , the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

[TREX]

Originally Posted by Brunaks

Painted my Orchid spell weaver, 3 DnD skeletons and 3 DnD wolves bringing my total to 42 , the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

Nice! Do you play dnd? Ive always wanted to try it out since I have multitudes of minis and terrain. Just never bought the manuals or tried to assemble a gathering of players. I really dig DM scotty on youtube with his gridless approach to it so you dont have to use ugly lines on everything when building terrain. ( I think the same about the heroscape hex tiles nowadays) I used to make a ton of terrain that would be mapped out perfectly to line up with hextiles, it was exhausting, and didnt look nearly as good as terrain without them. I just picked back up the last few nights knocking out more zombicide models. Ive got 24 toxic zombies curing with only a bit of matte clear coat to spray on as well as some blood and slime, then those are finished as well as 18 more seeker zombies Im batch painting tonight. Also finished up 14 survivor models the other day. Puts me up a few as well. Ill update mine later in the week and fix your total. So fun knocking out sets.

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I have the DnD boardgames (they come with a ton of models) but I've never been in an actual DnD group. My girlfriend and I drove up to Coeur D' Alene (up in the panhandle) to her parents and I got her old airbrush and man, it makes getting through models a breeze. I've got probably 50 DnD models lined up and some Warhammer (Godsworn Hunt). Now that I have the airbrush I will probably be painting a lot more as it saves so much time priming and basecoating, I'm really excited for it!

[TREX]

Originally Posted by Brunaks

I have the DnD boardgames (they come with a ton of models) but I've never been in an actual DnD group. My girlfriend and I drove up to Coeur D' Alene (up in the panhandle) to her parents and I got her old airbrush and man, it makes getting through models a breeze. I've got probably 50 DnD models lined up and some Warhammer (Godsworn Hunt). Now that I have the airbrush I will probably be painting a lot more as it saves so much time priming and basecoating, I'm really excited for it!

For sure. I haven't picked up an airbrush yet but do basecoat most of my models with a rattle can as their primer. It saves much time putting down a base color for a model that has that color as a majority. I spent a couple weekends a year ago in the summer priming hundreds and hundreds of models from my boxed sets of different board games. I've still got quite a few more and a bunch of new ones that need primed but I think the ones prepped should take me until at least next spring for sure.

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Oh wow so you just get to do the fun part for the next 6 months! I totally forgot that I have all of my Arena of the Planswalker pieces to do too which should be a lot of fun, they look pretty bad next to my Heroscape collection.

[TREX]

Originally Posted by Brunaks

Oh wow so you just get to do the fun part for the next 6 months! I totally forgot that I have all of my Arena of the Planswalker pieces to do too which should be a lot of fun, they look pretty bad next to my Heroscape collection.

I plan on priming up my Arena sets as well. I painted up part of one of my first sets years ago but dont really like their paint jobs and need to finish the other ones so Ill probably prime them all again and paint them. Ive got 2 of each of the 3 sets they came out with. They are down the que a little ways though. Mostly I like to batch prime in summertime though because its not friendly doing that stuff here in Idaho Wintertime. Im sure yours is even worse than mine since you live at the other end of the state. When I do prime and seal in wintertime I do it quickly outside and then bring it inside immediately to cure in front of a portable heater. That helps the paint cure correctly.

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Yeah that's one reason I needed the airbrush because now I can just prime inside and it's not much slower than using a can and you don't have to worry about the accelerant. My set up is just a tiny compressor with a single feed brush but my tattoo artist has a nice dual feed brush he's never used that I am getting this weekend and I am ordering a bit of a more hefty compressor with a tank as well.

I need to check prices but it might be worth it to get another full set of Arena models with Arena of the Valkyrie coming along as well.