Miniature Mania

[Romeran]

Miniature Mania

I like painting miniatures. One of my favorite parts of the Lord of the Rings movies was the use of miniatures and I loved all of the behind-the-scenes at Weta showing off the magnificent minis they had sculpted and painted.

I am nowhere near as talented. Also I only paint, I don't sculpt minis.

I'm also color blind. I use a lot of color theory and my wife to help me pick the color palette.

Most of the minis I paint are made by Games Workshop although one of the ones I will show is HeroForge (great website if you haven't seen it yet). None of them are Middle-earth themed. Games workshop does have a Middle-earth line but it hasn't been updated in many years and the sculpts aren't that great. If anyone knows some good Middle-earth miniatures which are available to buy and paint please let me know.

Most of the minis I paint are 28mm scale but some are smaller and some are larger.

I'll kick off this off with a picture which adds some scale. Here's two of the minis which I'll post more about later with a AA battery for scale:

The left one is a Games Workshop "Chaplain" character which came in a box I have (you'll see at least one more mini from this box later). The right one is a HeroForge mini I created for a D&D campaign I play in. I'll post more about these guys later.

[Romeran]

In order not to spoil some of the later ones I'll start with the two in the OP.

First Chaplain Eldwyn “Eftwyrd” of the March of the Crescent Moon of the Luna Hunters space marine chapter (a custom chapter of mine).

You can't see it in this photo but I have a custom heraldry on the shoulders. You can see it a bit more in this one:

I actually have pretty close to an entire army painted in this theme. Here's one of the units:

The heraldry is all (poorly) hand-painted. I chose the black theme partly because it's fast to paint since I used true black as the base coat I didn't have to do any shading (can't be darker than black). This removes an entire (rather lengthy) step in the process, but it also reduces the contrast on these models which you'll see later when I show some alternate schemes which have a more mid-toned base color. I also learned in this process that I really don't like painting entire armies and much prefer painting small groups or individual models.

[Romeran]

The second model I posted in the OP is a mini that I made on HeroForge https://www.heroforge.com/ where you can make custom minis from a wide variety of clothing, faces, hair etc. they 3d print the models and ship them to you. You can get them painted, I've not done that before. If you do this I highly recommend you pay for the better quality material.

Tristan is a Bard-Paladin which I'm playing in a long-standing D&D campaign with my friends. Here's my little bio:

Tristan is the seventh son of Lord Elorfindar Floshin of the Floshin Estates and the eldest son of Lady Idris Amcathra, the third daughter of Lord Challas Amcathra patron of House Amcathra of Waterdeep. Tristan is a gifted bard who was inspired by an epic poem about The Crown Wars to become paladin of Corellon.

This mini is smaller than most of the other minis that I paint as you can see in the OP (even there he's actually slightly further forward) and so the painting is a bit rougher here, particularly around the face.

[Winddancer]

Awesome! Really well done! I don't know if you remember Naith Liathant, but he paints models for a living! Check him out here: https://www.instagram.com/wendigo_studio/ feel free to message him if you like :D

[Romeran]

Awesome! Really well done! I don't know if you remember Naith Liathant, but he paints models for a living! Check him out here: https://www.instagram.com/wendigo_studio/ feel free to message him if you like :D

I do remember him very well! How can I forget my first King Aragorn?

That's soooo awesome. Clearly mine are still very amateur by comparison! I may send him a message. I'm trying to branch out a bit in my style (lots of space marines) and learn to paint in different ways. I'm also considering trying out an airbrush some time although it seems very daunting. I could use all the help I can get, especially advice on what to improve and how.

[Winddancer]

Definitely hit him up as he does airbrushing too! :D And pft Space Marines, we all know Dark Eldar (Drukhari) are way better Won a 10 game tournament with them!
Btw he is also on fb, if you want that instead message me on discord ;)

[Romeran]

Definitely hit him up as he does airbrushing too! :D And pft Space Marines, we all know Dark Eldar (Drukhari) are way better Won a 10 game tournament with them!
Btw he is also on fb, if you want that instead message me on discord ;)

I play Space Marines and Drukhari too although honestly I do more painting and writing up lore (that no one will ever read) about my "armies" than actually playing and I've never played in a proper tournament just games at my house and local game store with friends.

I do technically have an instagram (and also technically have a FB) but don't really use either, I may still just send him a DM on instagram since that's where his art is posted.

Time for another one.

This is the first mini where I did some "kit-bashing". I scraped off the standard skull/eagle symbol on his chest. I took a helmet and carved out a hole in the middle as if he could put it on his head (spoiler: it doesn't fit on his head). The model is intentionally very simplistic as I was trying to focus on being clean with my painting and having good highlights and shading. His eyes are a bit derpy.

The "story" behind this unnamed space marine with strange equipment is that his entire chapter was devastated in some combat, instead of being re-assigned to some other chapter, he joined an Inquisitor who he now acts as personal guard and advisor.

[Winddancer]

Oh I didnt play a "real" one, just one Naith made for the players in the area. Bunch of damn cheaters too :P New one looking good too!

[Romeran]

I got some good thoughts/tips from Naith @Winddancer thanks for the reference.

I have a couple more to share before I get close to what I'm currently working on (Not a space marine!! Surprise!!!)

Similar to the previous one here I did a bit of kit-bashing to remove the chest aquila and stole another weapon (this time a hammer) from my grey knights bits. I went with a Salamander-ish theme for the colors. The highlighting is quite dramatic it gives him kind of a "Tron" appearance. Also his face is very red, I didn't realize until my wife pointed it out, stupid color blindness

It's also really hard to tell but I actually did all the outlining and the shoulders (which you can't see from this angle) in a really dark purple instead of black. The purple theme will return in the next mini.

Naith pointed out that this highly zoomed in, individual pictures aren't doing me any favors with respect to hiding flaws, he has a point. One day I'll learn how to take pictures. But is it not this day, this day, we post.

[Winddancer]

Oh awesome! Glad he did :D And another great model! Just say he bathed in the blood of his enemies and that is why his face is a little redder. Or has high blood pressure..

[Aewen]

Gorgeous models! I think you do a very good job painting them, they all look detailed and neat. As for the last one, his face doesn't seem too red to me, perhaps it seems that way due to the contrast between red and green. But Winddancer said it very well – the blood of his enemies! :)

[The Good Hunter]

I am a terrible miniature painter and thusly I can only applaud you on a job well done! I don't care how easy some people say it is, there are those of us that have the hand-eye coordination of a drunken wombat and yours are lovely, vibrant, and detailed

[Romeran]

Thanks @Winddancer yeah something about blood of his enemies

@Aewen thanks for the kind words. It could certainly be the contrast although as someone who is, in fact, red-green colorblind this is a "contrast" that I often fail to see.

@Sorceress thanks! My very first miniatures were well pretty bad. It takes quite a while to develop the small muscles in the hand to be able to paint neatly on the minatures, it still takes me a lot of effort and I'm nowhere near the likes of Naith as WD posted his instagram! Maybe one day (probably not).

Here's my most recent piece, my Purple Boi (or as I call it "Fancy Blue")

Overall, I'm pretty happy with this guy. There was a lot of details on the model which was quite fun (in stark contrast to the blue marine I posted earlier which was almost devoid of details). The star I painted on his tilting shield was slightly inspired by Lord of the Rings stars. I still have a lot of work to do on things like cloaks and cloth and blending the shading there.

[Winddancer]

Dont sell yourself short! You are pretty damn good!

[Boromir88]

Great stuff, thanks for pointing me over here @Romeran.

In the D&D group I play in, most of the other players use Heroforge (I'll try to remember maybe getting some pics next week of their minis). I haven't used them yet, not because I don't think they're great. I agree they are fantastic sculpts and well painted, an abundance of customization you can do, but they seem rather brittle. 2 of my friends' Heroforge models have lost arms or an appendage and they weren't even dropped on the floor.

One friend (and me too) use I believe he said it was Warforge minis? It's obvious they're not as good as Heroforge and you get just generic orcs, elves...etc, but the minis are more durable.

Anyway thanks for sharing, and I agree with others, don't sell yourself short!

[Fuin Elda]

Honestly these are absolutely fantastic I'm glad I saw not only the post in the Guarding Ones self thread but the link here directly! These are absolutely fantastic especially the details in the last one amazing!

And I have found that heroforge has gone down hill recently in terms of quality of printed items - I've gotten minis from them previously and painted them myself and I just haven't really enjoyed them as much as I have the other kits I've gotten for DnD so I understand where @Boromir88 is coming from there. If you can get them in one piece to you they are okay and they do replace broken minis for free at least so you could kit bash the broken ones if you wanted (the last time I bought any large quantity from them was 3 years ago now I mostly get TTS asset bundles as thats where 90% of my games are these days so the customization all happens on there instead so no real painting of my minis aside from the ones I've bought that are collecting dust these days.

As for photos I've found a ring light and a curved background and a bit of a more distant photo tends to look the best (not sure if Naith would agree) but honestly you can't see any real flaws in your squad photo - mostly because we aren't zoomed in on the details but seeing them more as the mini is meant to be seen.

Can't wait to see your next mini or batch of minis!

[Romeran]

Thanks @Boromir88 I haven't tried buying the pre-painted versions although I have played around with the painting on the tool a bunch (as I find it help visualizing the model). They have a regular and a premium plastic and the regular one is absolutely awful. The premium one is better and less brittle. So far I've been fine with mine but I also don't move them around a bunch. It probably has to do with the 3D printing over the casting which most models which are pre-designed and sold in bulk go through. Even still, my plastic warhammer minis can break easily with the small bits of plastic.

Thanks @Fuin Elda! And yeah I agree HeroForge mini quality isn't great, the main reason that I'd do it at all is the customization. But if I could find a good pre-cast mini which met all of my expectations I'd definitely prefer it. The Games Workshop minis as you can tell are far more detailed and of a higher quality. Ever since COVID we've played online as well so this mini hasn't even been used in a game I just wanted to paint my character.

I need to get better at taking the photos. I built a little light box here, but yeah I think the photos are still taken from much to close and the lights that I used (which you can tell are somewhat yellow) leave much to be desired. I always find that the minis look so much better in person than in any photos I manage to take of them. But since I mostly paint individual minis how (painting armies and squads gets exhausting) I really ought to practice my photography skills! I'd love to see some of your minis @Fuin Elda .


Also @Boromir88 and @Fuin Elda since this is my own thread I feel slightly less bad about advertising but you should check out my new spin on IK Debates in the lore section: Change My Mind would love to see both of you participate if you're interested

[Fuin Elda]

@Romeran Agreed I certainly prefer cast minis to printed ones for the most part simply because of the detailing (I've been in utter love with my Dungeons and Lazers items because they are cast) I will see if I can get a decent photo of a most recent mini that I painted for one of my players before I moved. I'll likely post that in my personal art thread once I get a shot or two of it (I need to find my black light as I've also got it painted so its UV reactive as sometimes we'd do halloween specials and I'd decorate my house with black lights and other things and we'd play DnD and eat candy and weird food I made to look like brains and bats etc.

As you mentioned your light is yellow I have a feeling that is partially why the purple tone is missing from that one mini (I think I see the colour your talking about being used in the circle you see where ones belt buckle would normally be? It comes across as slightly purplish to me but is bordering near black and yellow lighting will do that to purple as they are opposites so it does tend to grey out the purple tones... If you can find a bluer light or a bright white that might help with that? I just got a cheap ring light of amazon admittedly for like $30 when was bored and making tiktoks during covid now I use it for lighting art and holding my phone super steady. and it has a warm cold and neutral light setting.

Also I did go and participate in that thread as it looked like fun.

[Boromir88]

Don't worry @Romeran it's my complete intention to partake in your "Change my Mind" thread. In fact I read it when you created the thread. I just can't this first round because when I read Elenhir's brilliant reply all I could do was bow and chuckle at his marvelous use of logic and wit.

[Romeran]

Been working on an attempt to do some camouflage pattern on a cloak. Will make a squad of three (when I get around to it...) of these guys and I think they'll look better in a group than solo (the cheerleader effect).

And the cloak:

Zoomed in images of single models always make me notice all the mistakes

[Romeran]

Finished the second one

[Fuin Elda]

These are awesome absolutely love the patchwork coloring on the cloaks as a camouflage style honestly I didn't read what you'd written at first and went hmmm Jacobs almost technocolor coat, gifted to them by the emperor. curious why the hard line geometric shapes for camo at random?

I'll admit the patterning does seem to work really well (and I like the looks of it far more) on the giant gun kneeling dude because of the flow of the cloak it just makes it work more so can't wait to see #3 in the set.

[Romeran]

These are awesome absolutely love the patchwork coloring on the cloaks as a camouflage style honestly I didn't read what you'd written at first and went hmmm Jacobs almost technocolor coat, gifted to them by the emperor. curious why the hard line geometric shapes for camo at random?

I'll admit the patterning does seem to work really well (and I like the looks of it far more) on the giant gun kneeling dude because of the flow of the cloak it just makes it work more so can't wait to see #3 in the set.

Technicolor dreamcoat would make for a fun Emperor’s children model.

The geometric camo style is a slightly easier style to paint and I watched a few videos to do it. It’s also the same style on the back of some of the boxes so I can’t claim credit for it.

I think I did better on the second one too. Smaller shapes with more black space and respected the flow of the cloak a bit more.

Here’s a close up of the second one’s head:

I got an airbrush recently and have been playing with that. I’ll hopefully post a model fairly soon with my first attempts.

[Romeran]

So I really enjoyed painting with an airbrush. It made base coating and blending from dark to light so much easier. Doing all the highlights and other areas required more patience as mistakes are harder to correct but all the practice from edge highlighting space marines helped out in the end. I'm quite pleased with how they turned out.

Intercessor Sergeant Amenadiel, 7th Squad, 5th Company, Dark Angels. Sergeant Amenadiel wields a standard-issue bolt-rifle named Fury and twin blades Lion's Fang and the smaller Lion's Claw.

Free handing the squad symbol (the cross in the seven is the roman numeral for 1 which represents the Dark Angels being the 1st Legion) and the dark angel's symbol on the shoulder pads was rather nerve wrecking as usually when I freehand symbols it's easy to correct mistakes but with the blend from dark to light green being so prominent on the rotated shoulders it would be difficult to fix any mistakes. I made a couple but was more-or-less able to get the color right to fix it (I think).

The airbrush has made me so much more excited to paint more as it takes the most tedious and painful step (base coating) and one of the most challenging and time consuming things (blending colors) and makes it fun, not necessarily easy but much easier than with a brush and much faster. With practice I think I'll get the hang of it but so far pleasantly surprised with how it turned out!

[Romeran]

Finally a deviation from the usual Spehs Marines I painted the three character models in the thorns of the briar queen. Seemed appropriate for Halloween. I sliced up my finger this weekend which required stitches making finishing these models tough so I made a last pass and I’m calling it good. Still loving my airbrush.

[Androthelm]

Romeran these are gorgeous. A long long time ago I was into WH miniatures... but unfortunately I never made the jump from FB to 40k and fell off when they stopped supporting them. I actually have the GW Hobbit tie-in ruleset on a bookshelf somewhere... a Christmas present in 2013, when those movies seemed to be going in a different direction.

Anyway, back to the (gorgeous!) stuff at hand: I love the dark angels particularly, that green is spectacular. Great minis and great painting! I need to get back into this...

[Romeran]

Thanks @Androthelm! I too started with Warhammer Fantasy I distinctly remember buying elven spearman and absolutely destroying them with primer to the point where you couldn't even tell they were wearing chainmail! I've since learned from then.

I believe Games Workshop still maintains a tabletop Lord of the Rings/Hobbit game but I've never owned any of the miniatures, perhaps I should pick some of them up some time.

I'm really quite happy with the Dark Angel, he's probably my favorite painted mini to date. And you should definitely get back into it! If you look at @Winddancer's posts above Naith is a professional mini painter and orders of magnitude better than me!

I recently bought some Custodes and plan to paint up a small army of the golden boys.

[Winddancer]

Stop knocking yourself! They are awesome! I loove the blending in the last picture!

And omg this cape is wicked! https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/ ... G_1861.jpg

[Romeran]

@Winddancer well I tend to be on the self-deprecating side but I’m quite pleased with recent additions. Did Naith start a new Instagram I tried looking for the one you linked above not that long ago and it appeared to be down.

[Winddancer]

*Curses like a sailor stubbing his toe* Instagram is a &%R&%! They banned his account and then completely deleted it after like 9 months! Despite numerous appeals to be reinstated. All of it gone, poof. He is needless to say livid..

[Androthelm]

@Romeran I've also thought about getting into the GW LoTR minis, but tbh I think my hesitation is 1. that while it's nice to get on-brand LoTR minis I'd hate to pay GW prices for characters that are definitely available cheaper elsewhere and 2. I'd really love to get back into playing again. I have fond memories of running dwarf armies in WHFB in middle school, but I can't help but think that finding someone willing to invest in the Middle-earth games might be... a little harder.

[Winddancer]

How about getting them used on ebay, Andro?

[Romeran]

*Curses like a sailor stubbing his toe* Instagram is a &%R&%! They banned his account and then completely deleted it after like 9 months! Despite numerous appeals to be reinstated. All of it gone, poof. He is needless to say livid..

Uggggh what an absolute nightmare! Does Naith have a blog or website other than Instagram? I wanted to go check out what else he had been up to and was disappointed to see Insta had deleted the account, that's super lame my condolences to Naith.

@Romeran I've also thought about getting into the GW LoTR minis, but tbh I think my hesitation is 1. that while it's nice to get on-brand LoTR minis I'd hate to pay GW prices for characters that are definitely available cheaper elsewhere and 2. I'd really love to get back into playing again. I have fond memories of running dwarf armies in WHFB in middle school, but I can't help but think that finding someone willing to invest in the Middle-earth games might be... a little harder.

Yes GW prices are very inflated and they don't have a monopoly on LotR figures so if you're not interested in playing exactly their game (and honestly unless you intend on playing at a GW store it doesn't matter) it doesn't seem important to get GW LotR minis, some of them are kinda old now anyway.

Yeah I've never actually seen anyone playing LotR mini game honestly. Even now I own literally boxes of fully painted terrain and mats to play on and I play a game of 40k like once or twice a year tops I'm basically in it for the painting nowadays. But I'm trying to put together an Adeptus Custodes army now that I have an airbrush and the prospect of base-coating a bunch of golden models doesn't seem so daunting. Maybe I'll even go to my local game store and try to play some randoms? Probably not, let's be honest I don't have the social battery for that type of thing

As WD mentioned you can usually get minis on the cheap from eBay. I will often do that if I need just one more mini for my army and I don't want to buy a whole box.

[Winddancer]

<3
He is busy making a board game now, thread about it in OoME :D Going to kickstarter on Halloween! :D He has painted some of the minis for this new game too :D Gotta say it was a bit wow that he was painting HIS minis :D

[Romeran]

<3
He is busy making a board game now, thread about it in OoME :D Going to kickstarter on Halloween! :D He has painted some of the minis for this new game too :D Gotta say it was a bit wow that he was painting HIS minis :D

Yes I discovered the thread and followed the pages! Looks very cool! And I can only imagine painting your own created minis is quite a different experience. Is he doing all of the design in something like CAD and then 3D printing? Sculpting is a whole different ball-game I'm super impressed with people who can do that!!

[Winddancer]

Oh not making them himself, hired a Dane to render them and then make it into 3D files and then a friend of his who lives (way too close) nearby prints them for him :D The guy renders them from the artwork, which was also commissioned :D

[Romeran]

I’m going to try to take some progress shots of my custodes and record it here. Quite happy with the gold so far. Prime in black and then under coat in a warm reddish brown (VMA Burnt Umber) then a 3:1 Gold:Red mixture (Vallejo metallic gold and Vallejo red ink). Almost a Rose Gold which should complement the red accents (red cloaks on some of the other models) and I’ll do some reddish brown leather.

Next step is gloss varnish and then some gloss brown shade (Gloss Agrax Earthshade) as I don’t want to loose the metallic shine.

[Romeran]

I'm now several steps deep:

Gloss varnish step:

Shade with a glossy brown (Citadel Gloss Agrax earthshade)

Drybrush with a lighter gold (citadel Griffon Gold) & Highlight the gold with some VMA Chrome

Base coats in brow/silver/grey/red/brown are done:

Finished Red/Brown

Still to do: all the blue gems, the blue power weapons, and the highlighting on all the black (mostly on their weapons which you can't see in any of these pics). Then the bases which I plan to do with a marble effect.

[Romeran]

Finished up the first golden boys:

I didn't do any work in progress shots but Put together some jet bikes to go with them:

Here's a shot with them together. I went back and did the panel lines on the "marble" bases on the original three. I think I got considerably better at doing the effect which mostly came down to using a better dried wet wipe.

[Romeran]

I also painted up a "Blade Champion" (although I call him a Blade Wizard heh)

Quite happy with how the blending came out on the cloak. I really tried to test my patience in nice thin layers of paint.

The blending on the blue on the sword I'm still practicing. It's a lot smaller of a space and I'm going from BLACK to basically white and I don't quite have the brush handling skills yet to blend it as nicely.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Romeran: It is looking if you have a professional hand in all that painting, of those little sculptures. I know it will not come easy. But the colouring looks wonderful, even I am not personally a fan of those little action figures. But you do a real job on them and I admire you for it. Keep going on! They are awesome looking.

[Romeran]

Thanks for the kind words!

I got asked recently if I did commission work for paining minis which I took as a huge compliment (although I ultimately declined), so I feel like I'm legitimately getting better at painting. I still have some of my old minis that I started out with and they look roouuuugggh in comparison. It's really nice to see progress over time.

Yes the minature style is certainly not for everyone at some point I'd like to branch out and try some different styles and companies minatures. Games-Workshop miniatures are just well known for being easy to paint because they're usually chock-full of details and nice crisp edges which is perfect for easy highlights and creating interesting surfaces. By contrast minatures that are a lot simpler are actually notably much harder to paint and have them look good because there are not enough details and edges to use as a crutch and you actually have to be able to paint with hues and volumes, something I'm still really working on!

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Romeran: I know what you mean. I haven't done painting in a long time. (I voted for your creation in the winterthread). That was indeed a huge compliment and getting such notices from different sources says something of your skills. I am sure you'll reach the goal you have in mind, over time. Enjoy the progress.

[Romeran]

Little changeup from the usual 40k material. A friend of mine got a 3D printer and printed a model of Revan (a character from Star Wars) for a mutual friend's birthday. I then offered to paint it for him.

Overall I'm quite please with the purple light saber and the lighting effect (called Object Source Lighting in the mini painting world) where the light reflects on the cloak and up his arm.


To put it in perspective it's considerably larger than my usual fare. Here's him side-by-side with a Dark Angel I posted before:

Up next, and probably more relevant to a LotR forum I'll post some Wood Elves that I've been painting.

[Romeran]

Ok some slightly more appropriate models!

Here's a 3D printed model of a Wood Elf on an Eagle (sculptor: https://www.myminifactory.com/users/Highlandsminis)

This is back on the "usual" scale in contrast to the larger Revan model.

For this model the Airbrush and Drybrush really did most of the heavy lifting, especially on the eagle doing all of the work on the lighter underside (airbrush) and the highlighting on the feathers (drybrush) made this surprisingly easy. I wish I had a better photo of the yellow gems and the spear as I'm quite pleased with them but they don't really come up very well in this pic.

One skill that I really have to learn is photography of miniatures and editing. I mostly use my iPhone now and here I tried to use some paper towels to create a more uniform background and did some mild sharpness editing in the default iPhone camera app. Lighting seems to be a big deal especially at this scale. Live and learn.

[Romeran]

OK last update for now. Here's some more wood elves. I did my best this time to "speed paint" them by not taking an exhaustive amount of time on each one. I've got quite a lot of miniatures to paint for my Wood Elves army so I'm trying not to spend too much time on them.

Honestly the photograph quality is really poor. I have yet to figure out how to really paint groups of miniatures. At this point it seems like It'd be particularly valuable for me to get better at photography!

The eagle-riding commander is in the background here which honestly probably does not help with the quality of the detail on the archers.

Up next on my list of things to paint are some Ent-like models ("Treekin", the smaller ones, and "Treeman" the larger one)

I expect these will be a lot of fun to paint and hopefully (finger's crossed) relatively easy if I can let the airbrush and drybrush do the heavy lifting again. You can't see well in this picture but the big Treeman has some squirrels running up the branches in the back

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Hey Romeran! How have you been in your absence? How wonderful your paintwork is! They are marvels to glue your eyes on and study the little details for a while. Very nice done. There is lot of time in doing this tedious work. But well crafted.

[Romeran]

Thanks Aiks!

I’ve been ok. Mostly busy and alternating between hobbies haha. I can tend to hyper fixate on things.

It certainly is rather time consuming but I really enjoy doing it. I usually listen to an audiobook while I paint which helps for the more repetitive aspects of it. With time comes muscle memory which makes the details much easier. It used to take much much longer to do eyes and go back and fix mistakes but I find I make fewer mistakes now and so can paint faster at a higher level of quality. It’s definitely fun seeing progress over time.

[Romeran]

I forgot I finished one more of the golden warriors (Custodes). This one is the primary Captain and while it hardly makes sense for a soldier not to wear a helmet, I wanted to practice painting faces and to give him something to stand out a bit more.

Here's a closeup of his head:

And here's a close up of the scroll:

[Silky Gooseness]

This is so neat! The precision and the colour mixing is so good. How does the dry brush work??