Today we have a special one and just because I can, we're going to jam some extra special commentary in here too.
This is the Blacktooth Terror from Reaper Miniatures Bones 4 and sadly, I don't think it's been released to the public yet. It's one of the nicer sculpts in Bones 4 and I'd kind of like to have another one. This is my favorite kind of painting: high drama, low effort. He's mostly painted with the airbrush which established most of the skintones and the nice fade from orange to tan. The dark brown of his stripes and on his craggly back is an undiliuted Cygor Brown Constrast Paint which pretty much always shows up as black when shooting on a white background. I did minimal drybrushing to pop out the highlights and a bunch of work on the details on his scaryface. I specifically under-highlit the base to keep the focus on the dino but the last wash made that a lot less distinct in addition to adding the shininess which wasn't intended.
In addition to being a striking addition to my painted collection, he's also my 2,000th painted figure at least as far as I've counted correctly. Notably this neglects a handful of vintage Star Fleet Battles metal ships that have almost nothing done to them but does include a dozen or so battlemechs painted with enamels in the 90s. I recognize that I paint an unusual amount but over the years I've gone the full spectrum from hate painting to kind of liking it to obsessing about it on a regular basis.
So in those seven years, what have I learned? If you're a regular reader here you'll notice some themes, probably.
First up, contrast is king. Provided that you have a good handle on the details of a fig and have a relative level of competence in prepping, nothing will make a fig stand out more than contrast. I really started focusing on this in year like 3 and trying to do more with it has really improved my results. Normally we discuss value contrast which is the lightness or darkness of an element (usually 1 being the lowest lows and 5 being the highest highs) but we should also consider texture, tone, and temperature as well. In addition to the normal color theory composition thought I put into a paint scheme, I'm now also varying the temperature (warm vs. cool, see: beloved Cat Captain's epaulets and shirt vs. her coat, boots, and pants) in adjacent elements as often as I can in addition to popping out or adding texture when I can with hashes, slashes, dots, and other painted-on detail (see: Ragna's cloak). Tone is something I stumbled upon mostly accidentally when trying to work out how best to do red/green color combos without characters looking like Christmas pageant extras (see: Highland Heroine's desaturated cloak vs. her red elements). These things have leveled up my work mostly for minimal cost in planning.
Next up, I now super value pre-painting prep. I've mentioned it before but I hate dealing with mold lines when painting and I've started to really dislike large gaps that make figs look less like proper representations in a miniature world and more like the toys they actually are. It's one of the few places I care about immersion in my gaming as if that were a reasonable thing. This big dino had a shitton of gaps which I filled with and old and way past its good-by date Perfect Plastic Putty. Large molded pieces tend to have big gaps, particularly anything that assembles in bones white plastic and for reasons I don't understand, this guy had the big craggly back piece as separate. It's hidden OK in the sculpt but it was also part of why I painted it in such a dark color. We'll see some figs in the near future that I wasn't quite so careful in filling and they look less cool than they might have. I'll also add to this that undercoating with a zenithal or nadir shading with the airbrush is pretty much second nature for me so I get that part almost for free.
Basing is the other big pickup that elevated my painting. I started deliberately building, painting and flocking bases several years ago and went back and re-based just about everything I'd painted in 2021 IIRC. Occasionally I'll get into a "just slap paint around" mood and painting bases is a great way to channel that energy. The try hard ones are the fun freehand sci-fi jobs (see: Cuddy Grey's) or painted bark rockery (see: Ork Gal). I haven't done a big batch of fun bases in a while which is a good indication that I should do so and not just because it means I can be lazy later. Added bonus: I should do more freehand.
Last but not least: don't buy more than you need. I started hate painting because a) I got super tired of playing with nondistinct white Bones plastic and b) because I had bought so freakin' many figs. By the time that Bones 4 fulfilled in mid 2019 I was well on my way to a four figure collection. At the time of this typing (about a week prior to posting), I've got around 640 figs left in my pile of shamepotential
and print something like 75 figs every year which means that at my
current average (~285 for the math-inclined) it'll be another two years
before I get close to the end (assuming I don't kickstart or buy any more, obv). As I typed before: I paint an unusual amount and it's damned good thing that I mostly enjoy it.