TRYING SOMETHING NEW

If anyone follows my blog you may of noticed my disliking for unit painting. in general i dont want to spend more than 5 hours on a model. especially when you have lots to paint. not im not a massive fan of the GW style of painting. base coat wash blah blah. for me i just dont like those results and whilst they are ok for table top standard, i dont feel they are good enough for my table top. so it comes with vary patterns. if i genuinely love a model i will spend a longer time on it. and i can live with that. but when ive got 10 or 20 of the same thing. i dont really care. so how do i get better results?

well i stumbled upon a little blog not so long back. where it seemed that this same blogger has the same woes as myself.
so firstly check out his excellent blog here
HOBBY HORSE

basically he utilises much thinner paint layers/ washes have you. so that the white undercoat assists in the highlighting giving a white undercoat first. then a thin brown wash to sit in all of the recesses. and then painting your thinned colours as you will see. some of the results are great....so thought i would give it a punt with this guy first

he was a freebie from the marauders of the apocalype pack i bought from avatars of war. see the blog post on that here

so first things first...this guy..i can see why he was free. he is made from some sort of resin that if i were to describe what it is like....i would say "soap"
yes soap.... a really bizarre type of resin...if you see the painted figure of this guy in the avatars of war website...he looks very little like this one in terms of quality.
and to top it off. i dropped him on my carpet (bare in mind i love thick carpets so my living room is like walking on warm sand) and he broke into about 5 different pieces!!!
yup. soap doesnt make good resin!

this made me care even less about this figure. so i glued him back together and now even more so than before he was the perfect model for my first test with this new paint method.

 all of the paints used are extreme thinned down with a medium/water/paint mixture. and whilst not perfect and definitely needing some work. it still did'nt turn out too bad. the integrity of the miniature remains to be seen though. next time i pull him out for a game. i fully expect him to be in pieces again

 the skin would still require some work. but the somewhat translucent appearance is perfect for skin. it just needs some topmost highlights to really set it off. and you can see the base shading coming through a little thick around the pictorials...something ill need to work on.

 You can still see the odd spec of white in the odd very deeply details recesses, not really seen to the naked eye. but as soon as you take a picture and blow it up...well I'm sure I'm not the only one that reels back in horror.

 this method doesn't lend itself at all to metallics at all and you need to paint these in full. i went for a blackened steel look to help speed the model up.

overall he didnt turn out too bad for a paint job that probably only took about 40 minutes max. the intention here was to attempt to paint something that still looks palpable on the gaming table. but still looks better than the GW base coat wash highlight method.

overall. I'm happy at a first attempt at completely ripping out my painting ethic and trying something brand new. whilst it lends itself perfectly to flesh tones, it seems like it will be very helpful with unit painting, which is clearly one of my biggest bug bears