Tabletop Miniatures

This is one of the characters from Valandar's second Player Character pack. His weapon made me think of mer-people, so I wanted to paint this guy with an aquatic theme. About halfway through I realized the color scheme wasn't going in the direction I wanted, so I abandoned the aquatic theme and just picked colors that I thought would look good together.

After applying the final wash, I felt the model looked too dark and monotone, so I decided now was a good time to give edge highlighting a try, something I've always been too lazy or impatient to try. Holy crap, does a tiny bit of white make a difference! You can see that my blending and edge selection leaves plenty to be desired, but for a first time, I think some parts of his robe look really cool.

As always, here are a few more angles:

If anyone has any advice or pointers for color selection, I'm all ears. For this guy, I started with the color I knew I wanted to make a bulk of the model (blue/ aquamarine), picked a few nearby colors (green and purple) for the secondary bits, then jumped across the color wheel (yellow and gold) for the highlights. I think the model has good contrast, and the colors look ok together, it just doesn't have the look I was going for. I'm sure I'll get a better eye for color selection as I continue to paint, but if there are any places to start looking I'm open to pointers.

I realized that I never posted my complete army of Ice Orcs that I'd posted a WIP a little bit ago.

Here they are! Some of them definitely turned out better than others, but I had a lot of fun painting them up and I'm happy with how they look as a whole. I've only ever painted one other "army" of minis, and I used the same color scheme for all of them, thinking I needed to in order to make them look like a cohesive unit. It worked, but just as they were cohesive, they were boring.

I tried a different approach here, picking out a general list of colors (black, brown, tan, and gray) that fit the theme I was going for. For each orc's armor, I mainly stuck to the selected colors, but threw them on wherever I thought it would look good, not caring if the previous model was brown with black accents, black with tan accents, etc. I figured as long as they all used them same colors overall, the colors would tie themselves together.

The skin came out a little wonky, but if you've seen my other posts or comments, you'll know that was kind of expected. I'm pretty ass at painting skin tones, and used the orcs as a playground to hone the skill a bit. They still don't look great, but I'm getting better at things like highlighting muscles and shading skin folds and the like.

Anyways, sorry for the giant wall of text. Here's a few glamor shots, featuring my paladin from a few weeks ago.

You looked, didn't you.

This is slightly different than my normal paint jobs. As evidenced by the background of the picture, he was painted using only cheap craft paints (save for the sword and other metallic highlights). The reason for this is that I plan on hosting a Mini Painting Party, where I'll be providing all the supplies needed to paint up some little dudes. I want to do this without breaking the bank, but I also wanted to make sure that the cheap paints weren't going to make the experience unenjoyable. So, I put together the same kit I plan on giving everyone (#0, #1, #2 brushes, a DIY wet palette and some toothpicks) and got to work.

I've got about a dozen of this same mini. I might tweak the color scheme a bit, but the plan is to teach everyone step-by-step how to replicate the above, then bust out the assorted minis once everyone has an idea of what they're doing. Originally, I was going to pull the nice paint out after the first mini, but after seeing how well the cheap stuff held up, I think I'll save the pricey stuff for myself...

That being said, the craft paint worked much better than I was expecting. Part of it is likely due to the experience I've gained since I last used the stuff, but the only time I felt frustrated with the paint was when applying the final wash a good amount of green washed off. This happens to me a lot when applying washes so I think it's more something I'm doing than the paints fault, but it was much worse with this craft paint than the nicer stuff.

Anyways, here's a couple other angles.

I love Zenitsu's fit (from Demon Slayer) though the character is tough to love. 😅

This is a work in progress pic of what will eventually be an army of icy blue-gray skinned orcs. I plan on making a range of colors between pure light gray and pure baby blue, and grabbing colors from different parts for each orc so they'll all have different but similar skin tones.

The models are from Valandar's awesome Orc Horde collection on Thingiverse. These models are a ton of fun and a great balance between high-detail and printability/ paintability. I wish the bases were a little more interesting, or printed separately so I could attach my own, but a flat base allows me to add my own terrain later on.

I plan on doing a typical green-skinned orc army, as well as a fire-red army. Orcs are a fun way to play around with different armor color schemes because if something ends up looking like crap you can just say, "they're orcs! They just grabbed what's available!"

The first serious ground battle on Guadalcanal, during WW2. The scenario is from Conflict of Heroes: Guadalcanal, converted to use 15mm miniatures.

Have any good names for this nasty little fella?

I can't figure out how to post multiple photos on eternity, or I'd post more of these guys in one post. I really enjoyed painting this group for the start of a mordheim warband.

I haven't used this fella in a game yet, which is ashame since he was painted several years ago. The pandemic really put a damper on my game playing.

I both love and hate looking at him because he's so disgusting.

He's 3D printed in resin from the creator StationForge. I used mostly Vallejo and ak paints as well as Vallejo pigments for the base.

This is my friend's character for a campaign that we are in. He used AI to create the general look of his character, then designed a mini based on the outcome. I printed it out for him and used the AI image as a color reference.

Here are a few other angles:

And here is the AI generated image that the mini is based off of:

(The small girl is the character's sister.)

Been having a lot of fun with one page rules and converting custom models to get the flavor I want.

I'm mostly happy with the OSL 😅

This is my paint job on Yasashii's "Mind Flayer / Illithid Tabletop Miniature" from Thingiverse.

This was one of the first prints off of my resin printer, and the first piece I attempted air brushing; to make both of these a little easier, I scaled him up a bit, so he isn't quite "tabletop minature" scale, but still much smaller than what I'd been used to painting (~70mm tall).

Everything except for the red eyes and purple highlights on the armor was done with a 0.3mm airbrush.

Here are a couple different angles:

Unfortunately one of the robe dangly bits snapped off the back before I could start painting. I didn't expect the paint job to turn out this decent so I didn't bother reprinting, kinda wish I had.

This is a miniature from TitanCraft's "RPG Mini Starter Kit" on thingiverse. I painted him up just to get some practice painting minis as I'm just starting out on the small scale stuff.

Here he is from a couple of different angles:

I wish that the paint on his face came out a little better, it's something I've always struggled with.

I may be preaching to the choir here, but if you haven't already heard of it, check out TitanCraft. It's another mini maker website, but you can actually download minis that you make for free (they have paid and free assets, but there's a ton of free ones and you don't have to pay anything to download an all-free model). I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but I've been showing it to all my DnD friends and a few of them are sending me minis to print out for them, and it costs us nothing but the $0.25 of resin.

Just finished all the armor and now on to cloth bits! I used greenish white, deep yellow and dark Prussian blue (ak) over a purple undercoat.

I see a lot of bigger minis (medis?) from shows like DBZ and I always think I'd love to paint over them.

But you can't just start painting on top, right? What do you do to prep them for repainting?