More miniatures painting

The PCBs are designed, tested, and on order now - just need to wait about 10 days for the first batch of ten from the manufacturer so we can try out some prototype boards - very exciting!

While we're waiting for the boards back, there's still plenty to do.
So of course, everything else has gone on hold and we're back to painting miniatures. Or at least, I am!

I'm trying the Army Painter method of cranking out miniatures, but I'm not very good at it. I know the theory - get one colour and paint it onto all miniatures, get the next, paint it across all your miniatures and so on. A quick splash of QuickShade and some highlighting and you're done.

That's fine - except it means it's a lot time between taking your first primed miniature and seeing a finished model (although using the A/P method, you do end up with about 10 finished miniatures all at once).
I've been painting two or three at a time, and that's plenty for me!

Having not painted miniatures for a long time, I've forgotten the most important rule: knowing when to stop. Knowing when to say "if I carry on, I'll more than likely make this model worse, rather than improve it" is a skill, as much as keeping a steady hand to get the right blob of colour in the right place with a paintbrush.

So I've decided it's time to stop with these models.
 I can't do all the fancy blending and shading and ultra-realistic looking effects. But these models are about as good as I can get them without messing them up, so it's time to say "they're done". Well, as far as painting goes anyway (finishing the bases is another minefield I've yet to negotiate).

The eagle-eyed will already have spotted a few brush-slips here and there, but in the main, they're good enough to go on to our first prototype game boards (once they're built).

The black-and-yellow stripes on the robot are a bit wonky but, having decided these are finished, they'll just have to stay like that (knowing when to stop is a skill I'm slowly learning).

Most nerds are familiar with tabletop war-gaming, 28mm miniatures and the like. When I first asked at BuildBrighton if anyone had any experience with miniature gaming, there was complete silence. Over eighty people had no idea what I was talking about. But slowly, over the last few weeks, more and more have started to take an interest in the board game project, and have started saying things like "I think I had some miniatures once.... Space somethings.... Space Marines I think" and a few have even admitted to not only playing, but also painting miniatures for various board games over the years!

For the non-gaming nerds, here's a photo to try to show the scale of these models:

(the minis in this photo have been QuickShaded but not yet dull-coated so they're super-shiny. The coin in the photo is a modern UK 50 pence piece)

In my younger days, I might have wanted a finish like the McVey Studio miniatures.

These days I'm just thrilled that my eyes hold out enough to get the basic colours in roughly the right areas!

Next, it's time to learn how to finish the bases for miniatures onboard a space ship (the usual textured-sand-and-drybrush finish for a grass-effect  base would just look weird).

These "stampers" on Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1843680961/base-stampers-textured-base-stamps-for-miniature-w) look great but might be difficult to use, given I've superglued the miniatures in place on the bases. I think in future I need to look at the base and the model separately then just join them together at the end.

Right now, however, I'm just pleased that I've got three miniatures "finished" and another four or five almost ready to join them!

Army Painter Ink Stand

It was another of those frustrating can't-seem-to-get-anything-done-tonight nights at BuildBrighton last night. I took all the wrong gear along (wrong PIC chips to code up for our electronic board game, forgot the clamp for the SOIC programmer, there was no solder left at the space anyway) so left the electronics-y stuff and made another stand for my Army Painter paints.

Thankfully the laser cutter was behaving (though cutting at 15% speed to ensure a good cut is painfully and tediously slow) so I managed to get this knocked up in a pretty short space of time:

Sometimes you just need to  make something - however simple - to make it all feel worthwhile :)
Here's a link to the SVG for making one - https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9HAI5y47e_WdjdSeEFUREJjWUE/edit?usp=sharing

The centre hole is for 16mm dowel - 15mm is more common, so edit in Inkscrape as necessary.
Inks and paints together look pretty cool. Now I just need to learn how to use them to paint some decent miniatures!

Army Painter Quickshade Inks - more experimenting

After a weekend of painting (and repairing the allotment shed roof) I'm in two minds about Quickshade.

The initial use of it on some Tyranids and Cadian Troopers was very encouraging - it brought out the details beautifully with very little effort, and added a layer of varnish protection over the paintwork.

I've already ruined a couple of miniatures using the anti-shine matt paint outdoors, in the cold, possibly when it was a bit too damp. So this time, I was determined to follow the instructions to the letter, and make sure conditions were perfect for spraying. I made a little spray booth in the kitchen, made sure it wasn't too hot, nor too cold and sprayed from not less than 20cm and not more than 25cm away - in fact, pretty much everything the Army Painter guys said to do.

The result?

More badly powdered, frosty-looking miniatures, complete with crazing effects! In short, a terrible finish and more miniatures destined for the bin.

With this in mind, I've been trying the water-based 100% colour-match strong tone ink. I love the tin of dip idea, but if it's going to create such rubbish looking results, I'll stick with the water-based ones. But they are not quite the 100% colour match claimed on the label:

The model in the centre was coated with the tin of brown gloop, the outer models using the water-based acrylic strong tone. 100% colour match? Not really.

Personally, I think the effect on the robot models using the water-based strong tone looks just right for them. Dirty, grimy, industrial-looking is just right for robots on the battlefield. But there's also a massive dis-colouration, whereas the brown gloop keeps a lot more of the original colour, and a lot of the underlying vibrancy of the colours.

Water-based strong-tone is great for achieving a dirty-looking industrial effect

The dirty grimy look isn't ideal for all miniatures though - these were heavily discoloured using the water-based strong tone. So much, that I had to re-paint the shaded colour with the original base-coat. This has got rid of the nice shaded effect that Quickshade gives, and now looks more like the two-tone light-on-dark painting scheme I was trying to get away from.

There's much discussion online about "frosting" of miniatures. Apparently it's not uncommon when using spray varnish - so far we've not had great results (and at the same time, had some really cool results) using both the brown gloop and the water-based strong tone. 

While I really like the effect on the robots using the water-based toner, I think the brown gloop is much better suited to the soliders - if only there were some way of reducing the shine without ruining the figures.

Adding a splash of the water-based anti-shine that came with the Army Painter Mega Set on a previously spoilt Tyranid helped reduce the powdery frosted effect (but did re-introduce a bit of a sheen) so perhaps there's some hope...

The water-based anti-shine also helped restore a little bit of the Cadian Shock Trooper - though many of the details that the Quickshade picked out so well were lost, and large areas (like the helmet and shoulder pads) still had a nasty speckled effect all over them.

Before anti-shine, the details on the miniatures were picked out with sharp constrast but left a high-gloss finish on the miniatures

Anti-shine definitely takes the shine away - but sadly, also the colour vibrancy and model details!

I think I'm going to have to burn through a few more minis to get the combination of shade and anti-shine just right. Word has it that brush-on matt varnish works more consistently than spray. Hopefully this will work, as the original Quickshade had so much promise. I'd love to get back my initial enthusiasm for the Army Painter range!

Army Painter display stand in MDF

After an unusually productive evening at BuildBrighton last night, we're pleased to share plans for our Army Painter paint pots stand:

Here are the SVG files - load these into Inkscrape and save as whichever format best suits your laser cutter (or the laser cutter at your local hackspace!). We used the BuildBrighton "white laser" which runs off RetinaEngrave - a virtual printer, so could just print these straight from inkscape, but  also successfully saved as .dxf and can them on the "red laser" - an HPC 3020 hobby cutter.

Obviously we designed this stand for our Army Painter paints but will work for any dropper style bottle, up to 25mm across and 80mm high  (a few others have already shown a renewed interest in miniature painting and have also got a set - or partial set - of similar paints).

To make this stand, you'll need three sheets of A4 mdf (or acrylic).
If using mdf, the cost of materials works out at about £1.50 (we buy our medite/laser mdf in bulk, in sheets and an A4 sheet works out at less than 50p). This is a massive saving on some of the laser-cut stands on eBay which sell for £20-£30!

Tops - you need two of these per paint pot stand:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9HAI5y47e_WNFcxZnVJem9idHM/edit?usp=sharing

Sides - you need one of these
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9HAI5y47e_WSzljeEkxc1V2Wms/edit?usp=sharing

Assembly should be straightforward - the top sit on each "step" of the sides, there's a bracing strut across the front of the bottom step, two struts at the top and bottom of the back and the last strut goes under the pots on the bottom step (our first version didn't have this, and when you lifted the whole stand, the first row of paints still sat on the table!)

We used PVA glue to hold everything together. You can use Superglue for "instant grab" while assembling, but we liked that PVA gives a bit of wiggle-room to slide everything properly into place.

Army Painter Mega Set - finally arrived!

The postie almost thumped the door down at Nerd Towers this morning, with a boxed set of the Army Painter Mega Set from www.ibuywargames.co.uk
There'd been a delay in posting - through no fault of the sender - and the customer service from ibuywargames.co.uk was fantastic. We feel it's important to support local, independent businesses, and where businesses remember to treat the customers like people, we like to shout about it. We're already looking forward to doing business again with Ian from www.ibuywargames.co.uk

But for now, we've got a brand new, shiny boxed set of paints to play with.
It's the "older" Mega Set (Army Painter are releasing a new set for September 2013 with a few more colours and a range of seven different inks/washes) but Ian did us a really good deal, and with an extra 10% off his advertised price, we got the set for about two-thirds of the RRP.

We went for this set because of the dropper style bottles, which should allow us to dispense the right amount of paint, accurately, for mixing colours. With this in mind, we're hoping the days of buying up every shade of green, for example, are over! The reviews of the paint set are also very positive, with reviewers comparing them favourably with some of the more popular, "better" brands.

So what's in the box?

There's a painting guide, six different sized brushes and six boxes of paints. Each box of paints has a range of similar colours:

there's a box of blue-y, grey colours

a box of green-y yellows

a box of browns and flesh colours, and so on....

We've not had time to try the actual paints out yet, but they all look a nice consistency when dispensed onto a white ceramic mixing palette (ok, a small dining plate). At first glance, the Uniform Grey paint matches the Uniform Grey primer perfectly (that's a big selling point of this range of paints) and painting a pale colour over a grey primer gives a very good finish after two coats (you might get away with one coat, as the coverage is very good, but the second coat really makes the colour nice and vibrant).

Also included in the set are water-based versions of the Quickshade in three tones - soft, strong and dark. We'll give these a go this evening, and compare the finishes with the tin of Quickshade we just bought and see how they match up. Having already dropped (and chipped the paint off) one of our miniatures, the idea of a varnish-based stain (rather than ink) is quite appealing - so we'll see how the two compare, later on tonight.

The Army Painter method makes you re-think miniature painting

I've not done any miniature painting for a long time. Well, maybe three miniatures in the last couple of years. But before that, it was about 20 years since I last picked up a 000-sized paintbrush.

While waiting for the Army Painter Mega Set to arrive from www.ibuywargames.co.uk I tried out some painting techniques, using some old acrylics, to see if I could still paint an eyeball with a 5/0 brush without my hands shaking uncontrollably. Since the Army Painter method relies heavily on ink washing, I figured it'd be a good idea to try that out too - only this time using Games Workshop's old style inks/washes.

Previously my painting technique was to undercoat in black, and then colour dark colours up to the lighter ones - often leaving a thin black line between touching shapes - giving a very 80s-style cartoon look to my miniatures. The problem with this approach is that it's really laborious - every colour requires a super-fine brush (and a super-steady hand) to leave just the thinnest of black outlines.

And while small brushes for small models sounds like a great idea, using such a small brush means you only get one or two "swipes" onto the model before it's time to load the brush up with more paint. The trouble is, use a larger brush and it's really difficult to get those nice thin black lines between different colours without lots of correcting and over-painting. So I'm still more comfortable with a tiny brush and spending more time laying each colour down, absolutely precisely.

Here's a half-painted Tyranid, painted using a combination of washes (brown ink over a Skull White model) and fine-detail brushwork (carapace painting, patterning and face details).

I'm still not 100% sold on this model - I think the limbs could do with more colour (maybe a red/pink where the joints are) but I was rather glad that I managed to get the details in roughly the right places on the face (the eyes are in the eye sockets and the teeth are all inside the mouth!). I've never really used inks/washes, and this looks a bit  dirty and muddy, rather than neatly tinted, like many other painters manage. But it's nice to see that I can still work fairly detailed (though no clever blending or gradient techniques for me!)

I even went as far as a thin highlight line on the gun panels, and a little light drybrushing on the head. But ultimately this model was painted the "old school way" I've always done - with a tiny brush, layers of lighter colours over darker ones, and lots of patience.

(top shows my usual sized paintbrush, below is the much larger GW standard brush)

While visiting the local hobby store to buy some different coloured inks recently (Army Painter are bringing out a range of different inks, but not 'til the end of this month, and I'm still waiting for the paints and some QuickShade to arrive in the post) I asked for some advice on speeding up painting - I'm still spending far too long getting the basic colours in place, rather than on the fun stuff, like faces and finer details that really make a model look cool.

I was told to use a much bigger brush. At first I was horrified.
But then I started to understand....

As inks/washes was a technique I'd never used, I never appreciated that the first few coats of paint don't have to be exactly perfectly placed - the ink settles in the crevices, usually where two different colours meet. This can help disguise tiny imperfections between the joining lines.

Using my ink-free technique, even a tiny wobble in these lines was noticeable, so I spend lots and lots of time making sure that every area of colour is as neat as I can make it. Using ink to "blur the joins" you can, apparently, get away with a larger brush. And since a larger brush can hold more paint, this means fewer round-trips to the paint pot to reload the brush - which in turn speeds up your painting.

As I'm expecting some Quickshade to arrive in the post, any time soon, I thought I'd give this approach a try. It was certainly liberating. I raced through base coating a couple of miniatures in about half an hour (instead of the usual 2-3 hours it would normally take just to get the flat, base colours down).

using nothing but a Citadel "standard" brush, I painted the bone coloured body and purple carapace in about 15 minutes.

note how the hands appear as just grey blobs, rather than meticulously painted individual fingers (in two or three shades of highlight) prior to shading the miniatures - here's hoping the Quickshade does it's job!

I'm hoping the Army Painter Quickshade (when it gets here) works as well on my models as it appears to for other painters. Of course the result after inking still requires touching up and some highlights to be added and brightening up in places - but just the idea of roughing out models prior to inking has made me reconsider how (and even why) I'm painting my miniatures.

Ultimately the idea is to get some playing pieces onto a board game.
That's why I'm painting these miniatures. Not so I've a dozen perfect works of art, but so I've got some player counters for the up-and-coming digital boardgame Starship Raiders.

At the rate I was painting, I'd probably get one piece done a week - and by the end of six weeks, I'd be fed up and put all my paints away, still leaving a dozen or more miniatures needing to be finished just to play a single board game!

Army Painter encourages you to paint quickly:
To begin with, prime and base coat all your miniatures in one go. My Spaceship Raiders are going to be mostly grey, so they were primed with Uniform Grey spray paint. It took just a few minutes to do the whole troop. What next? Get you big brush, paint the gun black. Was that quick? Then paint the gun on another miniature. When you're done, grab another miniature and paint that gun too. Before long I had five miniatures painted grey with black guns.
So next up, paint some paler grey bits (I did the shoulder pads and equipment belts). Suddenly that's my three-colour analogous colour scheme done, right there. Although I've plans to introduce more colours and plenty of detail to the miniatures, I very quickly got to the stage where I'm ready to apply the Army Painter Quickshade and see all the tiny little details "pop out".

Sadly that'll have to wait until the Quickshade arrives. But already I'm looking forward to adding the little details to finish these miniatures off, instead of dreading the thought of having four or five more to do after getting just half-way through the first!

Army Painter spray primer first test

We bought some spray primer off eBay, some time after buying the Army Painter Mega Set from www.ibuywargames.co.uk. The primer arrived today - some time ahead of the paint set - so there's not really much we can do except prepare a few miniatures, ready for when the paints arrive. Then again, if we'd received the paints before the primer, we wouldn't be able to paint any miniatures anyway, so maybe it doesn't really matter.

We've seen a few tutorials on the 'net about spray priming miniatures. Almost all of them line up their miniatures inside a small box and blast them with a quick coat of primer. It looked easy enough, so that's exactly what we did:

spraying outside is always a good idea - and even more so with a paint you've never used before, and have no idea about how it's going to behave!

We stuck some sprues down with a blob of white tack and hit the miniatures with a layer of spray paint.

We turned the miniatures around a bit and continued spraying, in short bursts, from about 20cm - as recommended by the Army Painter website. After a few blasts, we let the primer dry and inspected it.

Sadly there were still large areas of bare metal. Maybe it's down to technique, or just not understanding how it works, but this method of spray coating with primer wasn't exactly a resounding success! The only way we managed to get a nice even coat was by holding the model and moving it around. We really should have used some kind of mount though.

That acrylic primer really does stick to everything - and takes a massive amount of effort to clean it off. On the upside, even in places where we were a little "generous" with the spray, as the primer dries it tightens up and creates a lovely, smooth matt, textured surface ready for painting onto.

Now we just need to sit tight and wait for the Army Painter Mega Set arrives in the post, and see how their "quick tone" method of shading works.

Painting miniatures is proper nerdy

About 18 months ago, we took a break from an ongoing digital board game project, and returned to an old hobby of twenty or more years ago: miniatures painting.
It's frustrating to return to something you used to be good at, and find out you're not quite as good as you once were! Without wishing to sound immodest, some of our earlier miniatures, painted during the early 90s, were - by today's standards anyway - pretty darned impressive.

More recent painting attempts still show the "dated 80s style" of painting - basically starting with a dark colour, then painting from the "inside out" (i.e. starting with the deepest recesses and painting up to the upper-most shapes) and finally highlighting the extremities.

Only a few weeks ago, we dug out the old Citadel paints, scraped the dried paint from around the tops of the pots and had another go.

in close-up, the painted effects are far less impressive than when viewed from at an arm's length!

Now miniature painting is quite a nice way to get away from the computer for a few hours, and do something creative. But our paints are a bit raggedy now, and we've already spent a small fortune at the local GW store buying up more paints, which now bear no relation to the paints we've already got (apparently GW changed their paint suppliers - and thus all their paint names - a few years back).

Building up an expansive set of paints is going to be an expensive job. But mixing colours from our existing range is a painfully slow task - take a dab from the pot with a clean brush, wash and dry the brush, take a dab from another pot, mix, wash and dry the brush, take another dab from somewhere else, mix, wash, dry.... how fantastically tedious!

Then, almost by accident, we came across The Army Painter range of paints.
These paints have clever little dropper tops, allowing a precise amount to be dispensed.

This approach means that inbetween shades can easily be mixed, accurately and repeatedly.

Suddenly, the idea of having 145 little pots of paint and having to use exactly the right colour on exactly the right model seems like a crazy idea!

Over about a hundred years we've tried artist's and craft acrylics, many different manufacturer's paints and, reading reviews online, it seems that there's a massive difference in performance between even the same suppliers of paints (the Games Workshop Citadel range is apparently very inconsistent across range types). So are these paints any good?

The online reviews for far have all been pretty positive. Even White Dwarf 'Eavy Metal painter Mike McVey has said they're very good quality paints. Which is good enough for us! But what's really got us interested, is the Army Painter method of "dip shading" or Quick Shades. They provide a quick way of getting a half-decent level of painted miniatures onto the tabletop, in just four steps:

http://www.thearmypainter.com/gallery_presentation.php?GalleryId=123&Gallery=Terrorizer&page=1

The results are nothing short of amazing. And, apparently, quicker, easier, and all-round better-looking than our recent painting attempts. There are obviously a few extra steps applied after the anti-gloss is applied (some extra details are picked out using very fine brushes) but to date, everyone who's used them has said they're excellent paints and get really good results, really quickly.

What better excuse to get some bought and try them out?
This paint set is about to be superceded by a new version of the paint set, with a few more inks/shades and a couple of extra paints. But since we're looking at this set to enable us to mix our own colours easily, a few extra shades of acrylic colour aren't enough to keep us waiting for nearly three weeks 'til the 2013 version is released.

So we headed off to http://ibuywargames.co.uk/ and bought an Army Painter Mega Paint Set.
The little online chat window popped up and rather cheekily we asked "Ian" if there was any chance of a discount. Amazingly, and by indicating our eagerness to buy straight away, we got a 10% discount!

In the meantime, the artwork for our modular electronic board game is almost complete and ready to apply to a prototype board. With a few neatly painted miniatures, and a working electronic game, we're very nearly close to actually getting a game tried out. But then again, we've been saying that for about six weeks now.......