PAX – Inadequate Tools

I was at PAX last weekend, a great spectacle of video, card and board gaming. If you haven’t been, you really should, it’s intense.

One of the many things I did while there was stop in at the Reaper Miniatures Paint’n’Take. They have a box full of Bones minis, you take one, a cup of water, a piece of paper towel and a piece of parchment paper and sit down at a table with inadequate lighting, and a variety of colours and go at it. There are no washes, no glazes, no clean water (after you clean your brush once it’s dirty), your brush doesn’t make a fine point, and if you like your brush you’re potentially kissing every other person at the convention.

I picked a model that looked badass. As I looked it over, I tried to imagine how I would paint it, given the conditions I knew I would face ahead. Enough details that I could make it look good, but not so many as to be intimidating. A small selection of colours, since there is a line-up to paint and you can’t take forever. I choose…

Bones is said to not need any primer. They lied. Whenever I tried to put paint on the model, it shrank away and pooled in certain spots. Someone at the table had a paint-on primer, and I was thankful for being given that minor convenience.

After my first layer, I was panicking. (Frequent readers will have heard this before…) It looked like ass. I’d covered all of the model in paint, but since I’m doing a white-primer there were lighter splotchy parts, the coat wasn’t even, some crevasses were white. I was not an Elite Miniatures Painter. Worse, I’d been caught bragging a bit to my painting compatriot earlier in the day about my painting blog – doomed, I was doomed I tell you!

“Never give up, never surrender!” — good advice for any project.

I had done the first layer quickly, so that I could get to the real meat of the work. I fashioned myself a black glaze/wash from the black paint and a loooot of water. Because it didn’t have the pooling properties of GW washes, I had to be careful about how I applied it – any pigment that was “hanging around” had to be spread out, or redirected into a crevasse. I alternated between this and a brown wash on most of the model before I felt like I had fixed enough of the original problems.

Then I did similarly with the red that I had originally started with, except that I used less water. I mixed it partially with some yellow, but not so much that it was yellow, just enough that it got a bit brighter. I tried to differentiate the inner clothing from the outer cloak by using only black-based washes on the outside and only brown/yellow-based washes on the inside. This involved a lot of back and forth, since the pigment wouldn’t stay where I wanted it, so I would paint on a brighter colour and then immediately have to darken parts of it, and then have to re-lighten, etc.

The crystal was a yellow, with white liner on the edges. A brief experiment with OSL on the staff top went well.

2 hours later I left feeling pretty happy with my work. And it wasn’t until 3 hours later when I pulled the model out that I realized that the skin was absolutely horrendous. I hate painting human flesh. I’m so bad at it…hence the Lizards and the Orks.

I gave him to my girlfriend, because she loooooves red and because we have a tradition of bringing things back for each other when we go away. 🙂