Here ya go, a valuable tip for not only painting, but one that you can apply in a lot of aspects of your life:
Don't stress the small stuff.
I mean it. Here it is on Wednesday and I am just getting around to my tip. I did this for two reasons:
One, to make this point; painting should not be your priority, it is a hobby (unless you make money off of it) and if you cannot get to it one day because of more important things, don't sweat it. That model doesn't care if you paint it today or next week, just cover your model so dust doesn't get on it.
Two, I did not have the time. This blog is even further down on my list of priorities than painting. Right now painting is pretty important because it helps me relax during a stressful time, so I chose that over doing this.
So, don't stress the small stuff and have priorities taken care of so you can concentrate on spending guilt free time making that model look great!
Till next time, True Believers!
Excelsior!
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Saturday, October 1, 2011
Begining: The List
If you think this is going to be a cheap hobby, let me stop you right now. Honestly, coming from someone who owns two guitars, a X-box 360 and has a few books, I do not think there are many cheap hobbies out there.
But, if done right you can budget with this fairly easy. Allow yourself a model or two a month, depending on your financial status, maybe more. It is the start up fee that will get you, but I can go over some ways that it may be a possibility to work around it.
First off, let us start by naming a few things *I* personally think you need to do this hobby in the beginning. I will start with the obvious:
Paint
Brushes
Model
Seems straight forward? Well, yes, you can paint a model with just those things. Will it look good? Sure, decent, table top quality. But there are a few things to elevate it and step up a notch. By my standards, here are the essentials for that:
File set
X-acto Knife and Cutting Mat
Washes (a thin type of paint)
Glue
I purchased most of these things from an online store called thewarstore.com. Good prices and you can find all of this stuff in one spot. My paint was bought in a case with I think 72 colors. I got a set of files from there. I also ordered a slip-a-grip mat and I have to tell you, I love it. It is my pallet and the paint will come right off of it, any glue as well. It isn't something you need though. The glue I had gotten and I still have the same bottle is called Zap-A-Gap. Take care of the bottle, recap it with BOTH caps or it will dry out as He found out. X-acto knife and self healing cutting mat were found at a hobby store in a pack.
The paints are the most expensive thing on that list. My case cost close to 200 American dollars and for specifics, it was Vallejo Game Colors. They come in dropper bottles which I find to my advantage for a few reasons: less paint waste, no paint drying in the pot while it is open, ease of coming up with paint "formulas" (mixing paint) by drops is really easy. The paint flows well, mixes very well and thins even better due to a high pigment count. Use old small drinking glasses to clean your brushes off or plastic throw away ones.
I believe if you wanted to you could buy the paints specific to the project you are working on to keep starting costs down. If you were doing Space Marines in Ultramarine blue or Cygnar you could limit to a few blues, metallic, black, white, and any accent colors like browns for belts or whatnot. This has potential to keep cost down but could also cause frustration when you want a color for something and you do not have it.
At this point I am going to talk about washes for a second. I never used them till the minis I painted for my gaming group, and even then I used thinned paints for them, as is feasible and frankly sometimes better than pre-made washes. BUT, I digress I recently discovered delven mud and badhab black, (I am not sure if I am spelling those 100% correct, and frankly Scarlet, I don't give a damn) let me tell you this about them, they flow awesome and work great, plus, they smell weird as can be (like burning).
Files are for cleaning off mold lines, as is the X-acto blade. Be careful to not ruin the model while trying to "clean it up".
I will create a post just for supplies I use if you want to get an idea of where I am or where to start. It will be JUST a list and when I mention another product I will add it there.
On a final note, there are a couple of other important things that make painting easier. Primer, everyone has a favorite, I use gray Gesso because I live in a state where using spray primer outside is not the easiest due to constant weather changes. I'm rough on brushes and that is where brush soap or pink soap (as it is called) comes in handy. It cleans the brushes really well and conditions them. You can get both of these at a local hobby store as well.
I think that is a decent list of the essentials for starting out, give or take a few items. Hope this helped.
But, if done right you can budget with this fairly easy. Allow yourself a model or two a month, depending on your financial status, maybe more. It is the start up fee that will get you, but I can go over some ways that it may be a possibility to work around it.
First off, let us start by naming a few things *I* personally think you need to do this hobby in the beginning. I will start with the obvious:
Paint
Brushes
Model
Seems straight forward? Well, yes, you can paint a model with just those things. Will it look good? Sure, decent, table top quality. But there are a few things to elevate it and step up a notch. By my standards, here are the essentials for that:
File set
X-acto Knife and Cutting Mat
Washes (a thin type of paint)
Glue
I purchased most of these things from an online store called thewarstore.com. Good prices and you can find all of this stuff in one spot. My paint was bought in a case with I think 72 colors. I got a set of files from there. I also ordered a slip-a-grip mat and I have to tell you, I love it. It is my pallet and the paint will come right off of it, any glue as well. It isn't something you need though. The glue I had gotten and I still have the same bottle is called Zap-A-Gap. Take care of the bottle, recap it with BOTH caps or it will dry out as He found out. X-acto knife and self healing cutting mat were found at a hobby store in a pack.
The paints are the most expensive thing on that list. My case cost close to 200 American dollars and for specifics, it was Vallejo Game Colors. They come in dropper bottles which I find to my advantage for a few reasons: less paint waste, no paint drying in the pot while it is open, ease of coming up with paint "formulas" (mixing paint) by drops is really easy. The paint flows well, mixes very well and thins even better due to a high pigment count. Use old small drinking glasses to clean your brushes off or plastic throw away ones.
I believe if you wanted to you could buy the paints specific to the project you are working on to keep starting costs down. If you were doing Space Marines in Ultramarine blue or Cygnar you could limit to a few blues, metallic, black, white, and any accent colors like browns for belts or whatnot. This has potential to keep cost down but could also cause frustration when you want a color for something and you do not have it.
At this point I am going to talk about washes for a second. I never used them till the minis I painted for my gaming group, and even then I used thinned paints for them, as is feasible and frankly sometimes better than pre-made washes. BUT, I digress I recently discovered delven mud and badhab black, (I am not sure if I am spelling those 100% correct, and frankly Scarlet, I don't give a damn) let me tell you this about them, they flow awesome and work great, plus, they smell weird as can be (like burning).
Files are for cleaning off mold lines, as is the X-acto blade. Be careful to not ruin the model while trying to "clean it up".
I will create a post just for supplies I use if you want to get an idea of where I am or where to start. It will be JUST a list and when I mention another product I will add it there.
On a final note, there are a couple of other important things that make painting easier. Primer, everyone has a favorite, I use gray Gesso because I live in a state where using spray primer outside is not the easiest due to constant weather changes. I'm rough on brushes and that is where brush soap or pink soap (as it is called) comes in handy. It cleans the brushes really well and conditions them. You can get both of these at a local hobby store as well.
I think that is a decent list of the essentials for starting out, give or take a few items. Hope this helped.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Tip for Tuesday!
By Grizzly Adam's Beard! An update!?!
I was thinking that every Tuesday I would have a tip or a couple of tips. How does that grab ya?
Alright, first ever tip for Tip for Tuesday (that's a lot of tips):
If you are using a blog such as this one, or another one (I will link to many in the future) I suggest reading the whole instructions a couple of times through. I was trying to get a tarnished brass to look brass-like and did not read carefully enough to note that I was supposed to water down the mixture of paints it gave me in one step. Now I know, and knowing is half the battle! What's the other half you ask? VIOLENCE!
Till next time, True Believers!
I was thinking that every Tuesday I would have a tip or a couple of tips. How does that grab ya?
Alright, first ever tip for Tip for Tuesday (that's a lot of tips):
If you are using a blog such as this one, or another one (I will link to many in the future) I suggest reading the whole instructions a couple of times through. I was trying to get a tarnished brass to look brass-like and did not read carefully enough to note that I was supposed to water down the mixture of paints it gave me in one step. Now I know, and knowing is half the battle! What's the other half you ask? VIOLENCE!
Till next time, True Believers!
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Baby Steps: The Start of it All
I have been toying around with the idea for quite some time on making a blog about painting and modding minis.
I know, right? Another one? By Odin's black Ravens, is there really need?
Well, I need to blow off steam sometimes and I think I can do it constructively and maybe give someone insight to how I paint and where to find the techniques I use.
Of course, I really think I should give you some background first: I started painting minis sometime in highschool when playing DnD with a group of friends. We went to the closest thing we had to a local game shop (about an hour and fifteen minute drive away) to pick up some dice. While there we noticed that they had some pewter figures. Yeah, back then they still had the pewter ones on the shelf... and we picked up a few random ones for our characters just to use for battles.
This may not be exactly how it started, but I think it is pretty close. Growing up my dad always loved building models with me and let me tell ya, they were some of the biggest piles of crap ever. No paint what-so-ever and the glue spots... Man, it was terrible. BUT, my dad kept telling me to hide the glue and use it in moderation and we bought a couple of pots of Testors oil based paints for the engines. My models improved.
Years later I used those same old Testors paint pots to paint those figures and I don't think I did to bad. All solid colors, no techniques... just paint. All was stolen out of my vehicle at one point when the doors were left unlocked. I didn't pick up a brush for many years.
One night I was talking to a friend and like always we ended up on the conversation of nerdy topics. Warhammer 40K became known to me. Space Marines, oh, those Space Marines seemed to call to me as a fun to play in a game. Something about genetically altered demi-humans fighting for the safety of mankind. Huh. Well, my friend ordered some for himself, a tac squad. I quite enjoyed the looks of them and decided that with my tax return from that year I was going to purchase some models and a complete set of paints.
At the time I was going mostly off of advice that my friend was giving me due to the fact that I had an old computer and it was this side of useless. He ordered some Vallejo and I liked the price and the fact that they came in a case, had dropper bottles for less paint waste (what I thought at the time) and that I was told that they had a high pigment count. So I did the same. As a matter of fact, I think I spent close to 300 on my first set of supplies for this hobby. A Slip-A-Grip mat, file set, sprue cutters, brushes and probably a few other things I cant remember right now. That was back in winter of 2008. I went to Hobby Lobby and had gotten a few things there as well, like a self-healing cutting mat with an Exacto-knife. Somewhere along that time I got some Zap-A-Gap (in my opinion, best glue ever).
I had gotten a squad of Tac Marines and some Grey Knights. Keep in mind I purchased the Grey Knights as something I planned to paint when I improved my skill and they still are sitting in a container in my room. Actually, there is a small bin dedicated to things that I planned on painting but never got to. Some of my favorite GW models are in there, along with a squad of Vet Marines.
Anyway, back to the matter at hand. Baby's First Tactical Squad... Wait for it... Awwwwww... So here it is, I cleaned them up and painted them black, green and chainmail, black was dominant. I still plan on using that color scheme to do my Veteran squad, but using gray instead of black (I planned on gray being the Vet color instead of black). The tac squad I worked on was pretty decent, I learned how to clean up mold lines and how not to cut them off the sprue, simple things.
Fast forward a year: I got some Tau off of E-bay for a great price. No progress on Marines at all, as I wanted to do Tau now. Some were painted, and I stripped them. Some were still on the sprue and those are the ones that I ended up painting right away. I did something like three Kroot, one Kroot hound (I loved painting them by the way, and that is how I learned to drybrush) and two or three Fire Warriors. Life got in the way.
Fast forward to June or August of 2010. My friend that has gotten my into all of these hobbies is also my DM and has made a rather large and robust world for our campaign setting. He really loves the feel of Steampunk and made our campaign based on that. We started off with 4th Ed. and ended up switching to the Pathfinder system by Paizo. Couple of small notes here: one, our group was in constant flux of how many people gamed with us, with the basic number being around five; two, those of us loyal to the campaign setting really enjoyed it.
Enter me going bat-shit crazy. I was talking to my DM as we always did about what we were using for DnD minis and at the time we used Legos for our characters. I came up with the idea that him and I could secretly paint and modify minis for each person's character. Enter Warmachine: I must have looked online at various miniature dealers for decent representations of what we both coaxed out of the players that their respective characters looked like for better part of two weeks. The DM told me to check out Privateer Press and Warmachine specifically. Damn you to hell.
I found good models for each person and conferred with Him (we shall now refer to my DM as Him) about how each one looked, related to each character and what we would have to do to mod them to each person.
Commence undertaking. This is something I would suggest to anyone starting out: research, don't go in blind and know what you are getting into before you even put one drop of paint or take a file to anything. These models are not cheep and coming from someone that makes less than 30K a year, I can tell you it makes sense for you to commit to knowing at least the basics before wetting a brush. I wish I had done this when I first started the hobby, but... "wish in one hand, crap in the other" as the saying goes.
More on doing these models later this week. I will try to break it down one by one and maybe get some pictures up...
I know, right? Another one? By Odin's black Ravens, is there really need?
Well, I need to blow off steam sometimes and I think I can do it constructively and maybe give someone insight to how I paint and where to find the techniques I use.
Of course, I really think I should give you some background first: I started painting minis sometime in highschool when playing DnD with a group of friends. We went to the closest thing we had to a local game shop (about an hour and fifteen minute drive away) to pick up some dice. While there we noticed that they had some pewter figures. Yeah, back then they still had the pewter ones on the shelf... and we picked up a few random ones for our characters just to use for battles.
This may not be exactly how it started, but I think it is pretty close. Growing up my dad always loved building models with me and let me tell ya, they were some of the biggest piles of crap ever. No paint what-so-ever and the glue spots... Man, it was terrible. BUT, my dad kept telling me to hide the glue and use it in moderation and we bought a couple of pots of Testors oil based paints for the engines. My models improved.
Years later I used those same old Testors paint pots to paint those figures and I don't think I did to bad. All solid colors, no techniques... just paint. All was stolen out of my vehicle at one point when the doors were left unlocked. I didn't pick up a brush for many years.
One night I was talking to a friend and like always we ended up on the conversation of nerdy topics. Warhammer 40K became known to me. Space Marines, oh, those Space Marines seemed to call to me as a fun to play in a game. Something about genetically altered demi-humans fighting for the safety of mankind. Huh. Well, my friend ordered some for himself, a tac squad. I quite enjoyed the looks of them and decided that with my tax return from that year I was going to purchase some models and a complete set of paints.
At the time I was going mostly off of advice that my friend was giving me due to the fact that I had an old computer and it was this side of useless. He ordered some Vallejo and I liked the price and the fact that they came in a case, had dropper bottles for less paint waste (what I thought at the time) and that I was told that they had a high pigment count. So I did the same. As a matter of fact, I think I spent close to 300 on my first set of supplies for this hobby. A Slip-A-Grip mat, file set, sprue cutters, brushes and probably a few other things I cant remember right now. That was back in winter of 2008. I went to Hobby Lobby and had gotten a few things there as well, like a self-healing cutting mat with an Exacto-knife. Somewhere along that time I got some Zap-A-Gap (in my opinion, best glue ever).
I had gotten a squad of Tac Marines and some Grey Knights. Keep in mind I purchased the Grey Knights as something I planned to paint when I improved my skill and they still are sitting in a container in my room. Actually, there is a small bin dedicated to things that I planned on painting but never got to. Some of my favorite GW models are in there, along with a squad of Vet Marines.
Anyway, back to the matter at hand. Baby's First Tactical Squad... Wait for it... Awwwwww... So here it is, I cleaned them up and painted them black, green and chainmail, black was dominant. I still plan on using that color scheme to do my Veteran squad, but using gray instead of black (I planned on gray being the Vet color instead of black). The tac squad I worked on was pretty decent, I learned how to clean up mold lines and how not to cut them off the sprue, simple things.
Fast forward a year: I got some Tau off of E-bay for a great price. No progress on Marines at all, as I wanted to do Tau now. Some were painted, and I stripped them. Some were still on the sprue and those are the ones that I ended up painting right away. I did something like three Kroot, one Kroot hound (I loved painting them by the way, and that is how I learned to drybrush) and two or three Fire Warriors. Life got in the way.
Fast forward to June or August of 2010. My friend that has gotten my into all of these hobbies is also my DM and has made a rather large and robust world for our campaign setting. He really loves the feel of Steampunk and made our campaign based on that. We started off with 4th Ed. and ended up switching to the Pathfinder system by Paizo. Couple of small notes here: one, our group was in constant flux of how many people gamed with us, with the basic number being around five; two, those of us loyal to the campaign setting really enjoyed it.
Enter me going bat-shit crazy. I was talking to my DM as we always did about what we were using for DnD minis and at the time we used Legos for our characters. I came up with the idea that him and I could secretly paint and modify minis for each person's character. Enter Warmachine: I must have looked online at various miniature dealers for decent representations of what we both coaxed out of the players that their respective characters looked like for better part of two weeks. The DM told me to check out Privateer Press and Warmachine specifically. Damn you to hell.
I found good models for each person and conferred with Him (we shall now refer to my DM as Him) about how each one looked, related to each character and what we would have to do to mod them to each person.
Commence undertaking. This is something I would suggest to anyone starting out: research, don't go in blind and know what you are getting into before you even put one drop of paint or take a file to anything. These models are not cheep and coming from someone that makes less than 30K a year, I can tell you it makes sense for you to commit to knowing at least the basics before wetting a brush. I wish I had done this when I first started the hobby, but... "wish in one hand, crap in the other" as the saying goes.
More on doing these models later this week. I will try to break it down one by one and maybe get some pictures up...
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Well shit...
Lets get things started. I made this because I didn't think that Facebook was a place that I needed to post everything, and also, sometimes it wouldn't let me post my large ramblings. Well, now you get to enjoy them, as well as many other things. Yay. Me.
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