Another old timer getting back into the hobby ...

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Dr. Tachyon

New member
Hey all,

Just like to say hello to all you people on his very inspiring (and envy causing) site.

I used to paint a bit about 15 years or so ago, and I have only painted one miniature in about 9 years. I have to say nostalgia is a pain, because I thought I was reasonably ok until I found an old Chaos Warrior (the one with the axe and the old Bloodthirster head mutation) and discovered I was average at best. I think I preferred the rose-tinted glasses.

However, I recently decided (after getting stiffed out of my fee for teaching a class in Maya character animation) to make said fee-stiffing gets cough up for a Citadel paint set (the big one in the case) and Skull Pass, as I have always had a fondness for both dwarfs and the greenskins. I also made my brother get me the CMON pdf guide for Christmas, so I was ready to get started.

I currently paint at a very low tabletop standard, but after seeing the Digic \'Mark of Chaos\' cinematic and modelling my own cool, bald Warhammer warrior priest in XSI I decided to have a look on here to see if there were any minis of it.

Needless to say after seeing the painted versions on here (you know the ones I mean), I had to get one.

All this waffle is a rather roundabout way of leading up to my rant (I am old, after all) - what the hell is going on with miniature\'s eyes nowadays? In my day minis had huge eyes (and slightly out of proportion faces) that I could at least paint. These modern ones are tiny.

I used to use the paint the eyeballs black and dot a 2/0 tip in each corner method, but now I think I\'d end up giving him a Joker-style makeover.

Does anyone have any tips on how to do them? Tried and tested kind of things? I\'m bricking it just thinking about painting this excellent (but cursedly fiddly) mini.

Thanks in advance for any advice (and any abuse too, I suppose).
 
R

rocketandroll

New member
Originally posted by Dr. Tachyon
Hey all,

Just like to say hello to all you people on his very inspiring (and envy causing) site.

I used to use the paint the eyeballs black and dot a 2/0 tip in each corner method, but now I think I\'d end up giving him a Joker-style makeover.

Does anyone have any tips on how to do them? Tried and tested kind of things? I\'m bricking it just thinking about painting this excellent (but cursedly fiddly) mini.

Thanks in advance for any advice (and any abuse too, I suppose).
Click to expand...



Hi!!! And welcome back!! :)

Eyes are a pain in the a**, as you say, the level of sculpting detail has gone up hand in hand with painting quality over recent years and it is hard to do...

Others will probably have better advice, but I find either, using a 0.1mm black fineliner pen (the fibretip technical pens) are a good bet for eyes, or, the tip of a pin with some milk-consistency watered down paint on the tip are a good bet.

Post some pics of your stuff and you\'ll find folks will give you endless advice and tips, and very little abuse!!! :)


All the best!


Ben
 
Sand Rat

Sand Rat

New member
Welcome back.

Heres a nice article from Reaper

http://www.reapermini.com/TheCraft/12

And a couple from here -

http://www.coolminiornot.com/article/aid/55
http://www.coolminiornot.com/article/aid/74

Hope these help.
 
lizcam

lizcam

New member
Ah, faces. The bane of any mini painters world. Eyes. Do them first.

Paint the whole eye are the darkest color used for shadowing the face and then paint the white of the eye in an almost white grey.

Then I personally move to a Reaper 20/0 fine detail brush (I keep one just for eyes because they are cheap brushes and get all bendy at the end if you so much as breath on them wrong), take a real deep breath, hold it, stick your tongue between your teeth and using really thin paint dab on the iris color on one eye.

From there I look at it , congradulate myself on the success of the first eye and move on to the second.

I find turning the mini upside down helps keep things about the same size. I then do the breath tongue thing again, look at the mini, swear, take a really big sip of whatever alchohal I\'ve been drinking to work up the courage to do this in the first place, cover the whole thing with the darkest color I\'m using for shadows and repeat the whole proccess until I either have it right or I have to strip it down because there\'s too much paint in the are and the details are all filled in.

I\'ve had some successes. This is my favorite;

Mugg008.jpg


I promtly mucked the whole thing up painting the brows and had to strip it down again. I haven\'t had the courage to re-paint it yet. Someday I will.
 
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Dr. Tachyon

New member
Thankyou very much for the prompt replies, steelcult and rocketanddroll. I have bookmarked your suggestions, and I will give them a go (on practice minis first).

In my day (when the world was in black and white), a mini was about 4 feet tall and carved from rock. Easier times ...

edit: Thanks to you too, lizcam. It\'s a fast moving site here ...
 
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supervike

Super Moderator
Welcome back to the hobby. This is one of the best sites out there to help you grow and learn...or in your case, re-learn!
 
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Dr. Tachyon

New member
Thankyou too, supervike. I hope I can improve, my grand ambition is to actually enter a GD (maybe next year) and make it past the initial cut (most likely not in my first, but hopefully a couple down the line). Judging by the standard of entries here, that\'s still a heck of a tall order.

I do hope to get a decent digicam soon (or get my bro to take some snaps with his) for proper feedback, but don\'t expect too much - as I was drying myself off from a bath I reached for my budget deodourant (kept in the hallway) and merrily squirted away until I noticed that familiar chemical pong ... I can honestly say that Chaos Black primer takes ages to wash off your underarms.

Sigh.

Anyway, thanks for the kind welcome and insights into painting eyes, I can\'t wait to try them out.
 
J

Jike Ichi

New member
Welcome Dr. Tachyon!

One thing I can tell you for sure: The face is in my opinion the essential part of a mini. Even when the swords are best NMM or the clothes are smooth highlights, when the face is wrong its screwed.

I really take time for painting the eyes. I have a DaVinci brush, the smallest available.
I paint eyes first. The times of making dots are not over, but thats just the base step. You have to cut that dot with the flesh/eye colour you use.
But I guess steelcult already put on some good links, have to check them out too.
:D
 
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