SageMonkey's Getting Back Into It Log

SageMonkey

SageMonkey

New member
So basically I haven't been actively painting miniatures for a solid 2+ years now. Other hobbies and interests have kind of sprung up. Couple that with school life and I just didn't really have time to paint (that's not true I was just not motivated). I haven't really done much of any painting in that time, but for some reason did still collect some minis (mostly old and rare Rackham OOPs). That means I have a surplus of old and some new minis just sitting it drawers that have not been touched.

A couple months ago I decided that I would get back into the hobby of painting (I don't really game at this point). I've been working on some super old projects that I've had lying around for 2+ years. I finished an Uruk I started 2 years ago, which I'll try and get pictures of (it's pretty low tabletop quality, I used it mostly to practice and relearn some brush skills) and am almost done a Space Marine scout that I started 3 years ago |(as a practice piece).

Anyway the point of this Log is accountability. If I'm going to get stuff done, I need a place to keep my work posted and motivate myself to try and paint AT LEAST once a week. I'm not setting any goals or timeframes in terms of finishing miniatures, but every time I start a new one I have to have a set goal in mind in terms of what I want to accomplish with the piece. At this point though just getting myself to paint once a week is enough of a goal. Once I've gotten some minis done and kept up with good consistency, then I'll bump my goals up a bit. For now, we're starting slow.

I'm starting with a clean slate here. I might as well be relearning how to paint. I haven't forgotten everything but my skills aren't where they used to be (and even then I wasn't really good).

ALSO I'm going to be using a points system ripped straight from Pegazus' project log (so good, check it out) which the details for are right here:

-Completing a miniature is an automatic 1 pt
-Every WIP post is a .5X pt (where X is the number of miniatures in the post)
-I will be posting finished miniatures on the Gallery, and every point from 5 and over is 1 pt (5 is 1 point, 6 is 2, etc.)
-Every time I post something new to the Gallery, I'll get 10pts
-Any decimal score is rounded down before .5, and anything from .5 - .9 counts as .5 pts

Rewards:

- Every 50pts I can buy a new mini.
- Every 150pts I can opt out of buying a new mini and instead buy a box set but I must finish the box before moving on to something else.

Wish me luck!

Here are some late WIP shots of that soon to be finished Space Marine scout I've been working on. I understand the pictures are kind of unclear but I'll try and have some higher quality pictures up sometime towards the end of the week. I'll include pictures of that Uruk Hai as well. Anyways here he is:









 
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TrystanGST

TrystanGST

New member
Congrats. Keeping a log here does indeed help you keep at it. I know it helps me. The feedback you get is second to none as well.
 
SageMonkey

SageMonkey

New member
Much appreciated for the warm welcome, guys! Big boost of confidence for myself, definitely motivates me to get this stuff done.
 
SageMonkey

SageMonkey

New member
Finished the Scout, finally! It's obviously not a masterpiece and the work I did on it to finish it is sub-par seeing as I haven't painted in forever but I'm happy to have finished it after these years :D Didn't base it and also I didn't paint the eyebrows on. The face is sort of miscast in weird ways and frankly I don't feel comfortable painting tiny stuff like eyebrows at this point. Maybe I'll come back to it later.


I should have high quality pictures of it within the week, but for now here are some pictures of what I worked on tonight, as well as the finished Uruk from a week ago or so:











Should have high quality photos of that Uruk around the same time as the Scout.


Here's a hobbit (first of three) I'm working on now. My brother bought and put together a Hobbiton 3D puzzle and I'm painting these up for him :) My goals for this and the other Hobbits is to practice painting skin and faces and just generally working on brushwork. Also lining. I never practiced lining in the past and now I'm going to start. It's a pretty important skill and I realize it'll only make my minis look better.


Anyway, here's the work on the Hobbit I did tonight:








I'm going to try and get more done on the face now (try and make the cheeks a bit rosy with some glazes as well as the nose) because he looks a bit pale in my opinion. Tomorrow I'm going to work on his clothes :)


Thanks for looking!
 
SageMonkey

SageMonkey

New member
Alright well no pictures just yet, but I pinky swear I've been working on the Fat Lil' Hobbit Man-Child (official name) and I've finished the undershirt and am pretty please with how it turned out. I won't go into detail on that until I throw some pictures up but suffice to say I'm happy! I also got started on his suspenders/pants but haven't really done anything past basecoating and getting a first layer of deep shading in. I'll get some pictures on here by about mid day after I've done a bit more work.

ANYWAY that's not the point of this post. The point of this post is to inform anyone (mostly myself) that I'm going to be a smelly copycat and I'm going to ape fellow board member Pegazus' points system. I've been lurking on his WIP for a while now, and honestly it's one of my favorite threads I've seen on any forum (no exaggeration). It's a huge motivator because he's basically been doing what I am now only attempting to do for a couple of years, and with terrific results. Check it out here if you haven't seen it already. So yeah he's set himself up with a points system that allows him to buy new miniatures every time he reaches a certain points level. I haven't aped it completely but I've tried to come up with a similar concept for myself:

Teh rulez of Paint-Klub:

Completing a miniature is an automatic 1 pt
Every WIP post is a .5X pt (where X is the number of miniatures in the post)
I will be posting finished miniatures on the Gallery, and every point from 5 and over is 1 pt (5 is 1 point, 6 is 2, etc.)
Every time I post something new to the Gallery, I'll get 10pts
Any decimal score is rounded down before .5, and anything from .5 - .9 counts as .5 pts

As for how many points are required to get a new miniature... well, I'll be honest I don't know how I'm going to work that one out. At first I thought I'd do it so that I'd take the price of the mini, move the decimal point back one space and then make that the required points ($3.49 = 35 points) which SEEMED like a good idea under the assumption I'd only be getting Reaper minis until I factored in the possibility that I might want to buy some GW stuff at some point which would mean even the smallest mini would cost something like 200 points. So yeah, that's not going to work. I think I'm going to settle on every 50 pts allowing myself to buy a new mini. Wait, what about box sets with several minis? Good question! Every 150 pts I can either buy a new single mini, or opt out and get myself a boxed set of my choice. The catch? I have to paint every mini in the box back-to-back-to-back so as to avoid ending up with fractions of boxes left unpainted and gathering dust.

Well, now that I review my above rules, I'm seeing that it's basically exactly like Pegazus'. Oh well, if it aint broke, don't fix it! Anyway I'm hoping this will give me further motivation to paint and also post my finished works in the Gallery, and will keep me from binging out and buying minis out of line. I'm going to post a summary of the rules and rewards up in the OP so it's easier to find and review (mostly for myself but I guess it'd avoid any confusion when people see me counting points after every WIP post XD).

So my current tally is only 2 pts, but hopefully I'll be able to boost that with today's WIP shots as well as the eventual posting of both the Uruk and the Spehz Mahren to the Gallery. I haven't counted the Mahren into my points just yet because I never put up finished pics.

Until then, adios muchachos and wish me luck!
 
PegaZus

PegaZus

Stealth Freak
Good luck with sticking to not buying until you get enough points. Avoiding Kickstarter helps!
 
SageMonkey

SageMonkey

New member
PegaZus said:
Good luck with sticking to not buying until you get enough points. Avoiding Kickstarter helps!
Click to expand...

Thanks PegaZus! Haha not having money also helps ;)

Finished (for now) the pants on my Fat Lil' Hobbit Man-Child. Pretty happy with the "blend" (don't know if it really counts as being blended) but I notice that the highlights aren't as light as they seem when painting. This might be due to terrible lighting in my room/house other than under my painting lamp (I hope that's it) but I may have to go back and deepen the shadows/lighten the highlights. We'll see. Anyway here are those pictures of the Hobbit:









And here are some pics of the miniature line up I have on my desk:





^^ Two more Hobbits, another Finecast Uruk (the casting on the whole pack was really really terrible, not liking Finecast so far), a mangled Space Marine and a pack of LotR Ruffians.

Aaaaand here's a picture of my work area, just for the heck of it:



That's all for now folks, back to painting! +.5pts (2.5pts total)
 
KruleBear

KruleBear

Active member
PegaZus said:
Good luck with sticking to not buying until you get enough points. Avoiding Kickstarter helps!
Click to expand...
I hope this is not turning into a Pegazus cult! Lol :). Actually it is a good idea. The mini's are looking also looking pretty good, but are really low resolution on my iPad for some reason.
 
SageMonkey

SageMonkey

New member
KruleBear said:
I hope this is not turning into a Pegazus cult! Lol :). Actually it is a good idea. The mini's are looking also looking pretty good, but are really low resolution on my iPad for some reason.
Click to expand...

Yeah I think it's mostly just that the camera I'm using + the lighting situation isn't very good. I'm going to have access to a much higher quality camera and lighting scenario this weekend (hopefully) so I can get some HQ pictures up here and on the gallery (of the Scout and Uruk at least).

Also I messed up pretty majorly on that front rounded section of the pants on the Hobbit just now XD. I tried improving the highlights a bit more but for some reason the paint just didn't stick right and it ended up looking like a bit of a mess. Oh well, sometimes that happens! I'm going to redo that section of the pants tonight, reshade it and possibly other areas of the pants and then rehighlight it up to a lighter colour than before and maybe apply some of that to the other prominent folds. It's really mostly just that front gut section that captures the most light so that's really where the highlighting should be most prominent.
 
PegaZus

PegaZus

Stealth Freak
KruleBear said:
I hope this is not turning into a Pegazus cult! Lol :). Actually it is a good idea.
Click to expand...
I agree. My own cult would be kind of cool.

Not sure what to add about the lighting. For a long time I used both a "sunlight" incandescent and an OttLight, but the pictures seem to be much better with just the Ott. Whole different setup for gallery pics.
 
SageMonkey

SageMonkey

New member
Yeah for WIP shots I basically just have my sunlight bulb that I use for painting (I take my WIP shots at my station) and a piece of white paper behind the mini. For finished and gallery shots I have a completely different set up. Much better camera, several much more useful lights and a better background.
 
SageMonkey

SageMonkey

New member
Alright, last work for the day on the Hobbit. Basically just redid the highlights on the pants and began the blue basecoat of the jacket. Personally I think the pants are a bit more vibrant now but I'll have a more objective opinion in the morning when I've spent some time more than a half a foot away from the mini. As for the jacket; the paint I used was much too thin and it wouldn't set evenly. I'm going to go back over with slightly thicker coats and hopefully get a nice even finish. I'm thinking of painting the inner lining of the jacket a dark red to add some contrast.

Enough talking, here are the pics:





+.5pts (3pts total)
 
SageMonkey

SageMonkey

New member
Just a quick breakdown fo the next few of days:

Finished up the basecoat of the outside of the jacket just now, taking a bit of a break. I'm leaving next Tuesday early in the morning until that Friday for a trip to New York City so I won't be able to get any painting done for those 4 days. Because of that, I'm going to try and get the inner coat based today (going to make it a very dark red) and then hopefully start shading and highlighting the blues on Sunday (very busy tomorrow). I don't think I'll be finished the blue on the coat until after I get back from NYC unfortunately but we'll see. I probably won't get any painting done on Monday night because I need to pack and have some stuff to take care of.

Anyway I'll get some more pictures up tonight and Sunday. I'm very happy with the miniature so far, and hope to have it done and in the Gallery the week after I get back if all goes as planned.

By the way, anyone got any idea for how I should base this little guy? I'm thinking of trying to make the base seem like he's maybe in his garden or something but I'm not sure. Feel free to help me out with some ideas :D
 
SageMonkey

SageMonkey

New member
Didn't get much of any work done last night but today I've been working on the coat. Managed to fully finish the inner coat which I'm pretty happy with. The colour was supposed to be red but turned out to be more of a ruddy brown. I think it looks quite good and I suppose red may have been a bit much. Just now been working on the blues. Did the shading on it which I'm decently happy with but I may need to darken them a bit. Right now I'm going to work on the highlights, but I doubt I'll have the coat finished until maybe later this evening but probably only tomorrow night if I have time. If I finish it tonight then tomorrow I'll do the hair, finish the eyes and buttons and then the mini should be complete :)

I'll get some pictures up later this evening, and I may even be able to get those high quality shots and upload the space Marine and Uruk to the gallery!
 
SageMonkey

SageMonkey

New member
More or less finished the coat now. I may deepen the shading later but for now I think it's fine. I'll try and do the hair and finish the eyes tonight, in which case the mini will be technically finished. Still not sure what I'm doing for the base though. I'm not entirely set on the blue of the coat right now, I think I may want to make it green instead but right now I think it's too soon to make that call. I'm going to let it be until I get back from NYC and then I'll make a judgement call. What do you guys think?











+.5pts (3.5pts total)
 
SageMonkey

SageMonkey

New member
Well the hobbit is finally finished and based. Kinda screwed the pooch on the base by using sh***y GW static grass, which I'm disappointed about. I'm going to let it set tonight and then remove it tomorrow and try and get some nicer Woodland Scenics grass type stuff to put on the base. Anyway, that's something I'm going to have to work on now that I'm getting back into the hobby xD I'm going to get pictures of the Uruk and Space Marine on here and the gallery as well as get pics of the Hobbit probably by tomorrow night. I won't post the Hobbit to the gallery until I'm fully satisfied with the base.
 
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