Hobby Underload

Not so long ago I was moaning about hobby overload and not knowing what to paint next and how many projects I had coming up blah blah blah.  Well, it turns out forgetting to bring back half a 40K army you’re supposed to be painting and only having a box of three AoS models in the house when your nearest Gaming store is a four hour flight away kind of forces one to think differently!

I’m going back to the UK tomorrow morning so I’ll have the 40K stuff back with me and I’ll be able to crack on with that but for the last couple of weeks I’ve done something completely different and painted a single miniature as well as I possibly can (just to kind of test where I’m at).  And here she is:

I’m pretty stoked with her actually.  For those who don’t know, she’s a Stormcast Eternal Sequitor and she came in a box of three easy to build (more on that later) models in shiny gold plastic.  I was looking for some models to trial NMM techniques on in advance of my Adeptus Titanicus box.  So what did I learn?

1. Trying new paint brands is cool.  So for many years I used Citadel Paints exclusively.  Then about a year ago I went hipster and bought the Vallejo Model Air and Game Air mega paint sets.  This was because I wanted to airbrush (duh) but found that they worked very well for bristle brush too (I like to work in very thin paint…Nope, more thin than that…Keep going…That’s the way).  Now I kind of use both.  I find some of the Citadel base paints very good (the blue on this mini is Kantor Blue, for example) and the Vallejo Air paints are great for layering and glazes.  This time I tried two different paint brands out.  Scalecolor (specifically the NMM paint set) and P3 paints (again, another little set of paints for painting flesh for one of the PP games (I think) but I ‘only,’ used it for the base of this model).  I’m not a paint scientist but my thoughts on these paints are as follows:
   • Scalecolor paints dry very, very matte.  Almost chalky.  I hated it at first but I don’t hate it now.  I don’t think the coverage is great either.  However, these paints stayed wet on my wet pallette for ages and the colours themselves are really nice.  They blend well and they are quite intense.  I’ll use these for NMM again for sure
   • P3 paints are very opaque.  I didn’t do too much with these and I think I’ll do more with them on my next individual miniature but for now all I can say is that they went on really nicely, very smooth finish and the opacity is great.  Sorry P3, bit of a lame review but I’ll say more when I’ve used more.
2. Easy to Build miniatures are quite hard to build.  I painted this model in the three sections it come in off the sprue.  Once I’d done that I then had Hell to pay scraping back layers to make sockets fit.  Actually, despite the model being socketed I’ve somehow managed to glue to shield arm into the shoulder wrongly so the shield doesn’t touch the ground properly.  Annoying.  Full disclosure, I am beyond terrible at the actual building part of modelling and I hope the next project I do (probably AT with some magnetising) fixes this.
3. My faces don’t all have to look like house fire survivors.  Love painting faces?  Me neither.  Fortunately Vince Venturella has a ‘painting female faces,’ tutorial in his hobby cheating series.  It’s number 113 you can find it here.  I pretty much followed this to the letter and, whilst she’s not winning any swords, I’m not embarrassed by her.

Anything I’d change about her?  Sure, a few things;

• I don’t think there’s enough colour in the shading in the blue (it’s just black in the Kantor Blue progressively.  This makes it very grey and a bit boring
• The scratches and weathering on the shield is a bit half-arsed (yes it is there, you have to squint).  I think this has to come up a notch or ten to really give some additional light reflections to sell the illusion better
• Is the NMM great?  Nope.  Is it the best I’ve done?  I think so.  Here are Fulgrim, Eidolon and the SCE next to each other.  I think this is progression in the NMM stakes to be honest.

Am I going to change these things?  Nah.  I have a very specific philosophy on this.  It’s important to call a miniature done and then to pull it apart in terms of what you could improve.  I’m really pleased with her, she represents just about the best of my painting ability right now but I know that if I use the three things above that I’d change as motivation then the next miniature I paint will be even better.  (Actually that’s not true, the next miniature I paint will be part of my 40K army and I’m just getting that TT standard before I look to progress it but you know what I mean).

Finally, I have absolutely zero use for this model.  If anyone has a use for her I’m happy to pop her in the post anywhere in the World, otherwise she’ll just go in a drawer somewhere.

Comments and criticism always welcome!