Adventures in Miniature Painting #6

This is the continuation of last post since it was far too big to reasonably fit into a single article.  My excess can now fuel my post count so I got that goin' for me.  Last episode is here.  The whole thing kicks off way back in 2018.  If I'm smart and not lazy I'll put hotlinks over on the right.  

Paint Obsession

I have bought a lot of paints over the years.  In this era (starting in the summer of 2018) I have bought the Army Painter Starter Set, various Vallejo Game Color and Game Air droppers, several Citadel Washes colloquially known as liquid talent, Badger Minitaire Ghost Tints and 12-color starter set, Base and expansions 1, 2, and 3 of the Pro Acryl line, several Vallejo Metal Color droppers, and one of the cheap-ish starter kits of Winsor and Newton Winton Oils.  If you're keeping track, that's many hundreds of shekels of paint.  If you add it all up it seems like overkill, probably because it is, but it's super easy to fall into the trap of needing every cool new thing that your favorite talking heads like on the youtubes.  I haven't bought any heavy body acrylics, Scale 75, Warcolours, or other esoteric types but if history is any indication, I suspect I will some day.

And if you're wondering if this is not in fact overkill, I say nay.  I have now painted a paltry several hundred miniatures (around 300 at best estimation) and I have yet to exhausted a single dropper, pot, or otherwise container of mini paint. Heck, I've only killed a few bottles of craft paint for all the stinkin' buildings and terrain I've made over the years.  I will be burning through several droppers of my Army Painter set solely so I don't waste them by using them to paint my ever-so-pretty Dungeons and Lasers kickstarter terrain.  Mostly with a drybrush.  This one, if you're wondering.  So, yes, in conclusion, I have a stupid amount of paint that I may never run out of even if I paint the remainder of my many-hundreds-strong pile of shame which grows by the quarter.  

Color Theory

When I started I was afraid of mixing my own colors like I imagine a lot of folks are.  How the heck do you match the colors that you used last time?!?  Mixing your own colors is so terribly imprecise and messy.  There was also a ton of figuring out which colors of which lines would cover/glaze/filter/wash/etc and how they behaved as such.  So, like a lot of folks, I bought a lot of paints and tried a lot of stuff.  Now I know that I don't need all of these paints even though I like many of them, my favorites still being Pro Acryl and Vallejo Metal Colors by a long shot.

Turns out, with a little bit of practice not only can you match any color you choose, you can also control the hue and saturation of the paints you're sticking on your figure.  I was already (finally) learning about color theory for compositional purposes but actually mixing my own colors really drove it home.  As has been well documented here before, I suck at at colors, but perhaps slightly less now.  More pertinently to this post, I stopped needing so many paints which freed my palette and the seemingly endless cycle of shaking, dispensing, and being sad about the level of emulsion achieved...which leads us to oils.

Oils 

This year there's been a fairly large boom of folks using oil paints on minis.  This includes Vince, James, and Marco among others.  Having completed several figures in oils, I understand.  My acrylic blends are crap--I'm not good at it and it takes a lot of time and patience, neither of which I have in abundance.  I do like both void blending (wet brush with no paint feathering out a wet edge of paint on the model) and wet blending (blending a new color with wet paint already on your model).  Both of these are the default with oils and they remain workable for hours if not days.  As a hobby painter at best with a more-than-full-time job, this means I don't have to finish a thing in 5 minutes if I want that sweet, sweet, blending action.  And before you say anything, yes, I know about acrylic retarder medium.

I like the idea that mini painting is evolving past the dogmatic "thou must use GW acrylics and start with two thin coats and a wash" world because I'm a dirty heathen not educated in The Ways(TM).   I'm also  pretty sure someone else has said this but working with oils makes me feel an appreciation for Bob Ross, Pablo Picasso, and the great master painters of antiquity.  I suppose I can now claim being a multiple-media artist (yes, I made that term up) working in acrylics, oils, foam, graphite, pixels, code, and Lego.  That and a $5 bill will get me a coffee.  

I needed the education with acrylics and all of the experience I've picked up over the last thirty-ish months to get to this point.  If I'd started with oils, their fiddlyness would have been a paint tube too far--forget the pain of pre-thinning them and stuffing them into droppers.  I got into wet blending late, basically the end of last year.  More importantly, I like wet blending which is why it shows up in so many of my notes.  I also needed to be comfortable with mixing my own colors which only really arrived in the middle of this year doing shaded basecoat work with Pro Acryl Trasparents.  It was a perfect storm and I arrived at oils at exactly the right time to both appreciate and enjoy working with them.  Your mileage may vary but just about every time I'm painting with acrylics I ask myself "why am I not painting this in oils?"

Hate Painting

It's easy for painting to feel like a thing we have to do more than a thing we want to do especially as a beginner looking at a vast pile of white and grey plastic.  I got into painting because I felt it was something I was expected to do as a gamer and GM and whatnot.  This is ironic because I avoided big chunks of terrain building or years because I didn't want to get involved in painting.  I've always played with unpainted figs, some of which I'd bought in the 90s.  It was true in Battletech, various incarnations of DnD, and even my own games.  

In the two and a half-ish years I've been doing this, I've watched the quality of my work increase for the time spent painting.  I don't take every model as high as I can go--I'm not even sure where that limit is anymore and I don't expect to find it this year.  Not every model needs or even wants that, but doing a lot of batch painting over the last few years has given me some understanding of which corners I can cut for maximum benefit.  For those who don't regularly batch paint or take a fig toward the far end of their ability, both of those have taught me different things which I feel are necessary parts of my deliberate practice.  

I don't know why it changed this year but it did.  I still don't enjoy all of the hobby but I enjoy enough of it now that motivation generally isn't a problem.  Being cooped up in my house for months this year might have helped that, for what it's worth.  Knowing that I can crank out a finished fig in a day is powerful, especially when I have games to run and want nice characters to put on the field.  At this point I rarely buy figs I need to fill a role (player characters are notable exceptions) and buy more for how fun I think they'll be to paint. 

So there we are:  roughly a year and a half of leveling up in a thing I'm trying to learn.  Hopefully I'll be able to add another volume in this series in a bit.  Watch this space!