UNBRIDLED TRUTH

Well, I sure took my sweet time painting this one. I'd finished the base a week or so after the previous one, but one thing or another kept getting in the way of painting the miniature itself. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Over the winter holidays, I got a bunch of tools and supplies to base with, and while I'd messed around with adding some little details here and there, this one was when I decided to go all out with making a custom base. Not that I had a particular de

In the GRIMDARK future of the forty-first millennium, my favorite faction is Tyranid, which is sort of like a crossbreeding of the xenomorph from Alien with a termite colony. I don't own any tyranid models, so getting this little bug as one of my bonus models in my December order from Reaper was my first chance at painting up something along the same lines. In terms of the color scheme, well, it's a fairly bloated tick, so going with red for the sack on its body was the obvi

So, a little bit of a different presentation for the post this time, since there are only so many ways that I can talk about painting a skeleton miniature in more or less the same way, just using some different colors. Rather than going through all of the steps, I'll just summarize the differences from the last one that I did and show a gallery of finished pictures. For the sake of experimenting, I tried to shift the bone colors to a darker range in order to make it look old

I was fortunate enough to get a bonus stocking of gifts with my order from Reaper in December, which came with a few skeletons (among other free miniatures, but the skeletons in particular are simple enough that I don't have any discomfort about using them as practice pieces). Seeing as a skeleton was also the first thing that I painted with the Learn to Paint Kits, I thought it'd be interesting to try doing another one as a comparison piece to judge both how I've improved a

After making a couple of gift miniatures for some friends, I got the Masterwork Miniature Painting with Jen Haley and Anne Foerster digital download from CMON. I found that to be very useful to watch, for several reasons. Obviously, with how little experience I have with the hobby, any exposure to how good painters get their results is useful. Seeing them painting in real time was helpful, if only to see exactly how they get the paint from their palettes onto their models.

Do you want to know why I'd only had one post about miniature painting in November and why I'd been complaining about frustrations with painting in other posts? This, this right here is the reason. I tried biting off far more than I was ready to chew, so it took me fucking forever to get this done. I don't even care that I took the lazy way out on the base, the staff, and some of the leather details. After how long it took me to get to that point, I was just ready to be d

Well, I earned two of these models for spending so much on my last order from Reaper, and they were generous enough to throw in another two for free, so I figured that it'd make sense to use one or two of them after going through the kits (and after finishing with Seoni, since I'd started that one before getting the kits). Besides, since they were all extras on the side of my actual order, they made sense to use as practice pieces before going back to working on miniatures t

Well, this was a miniature that waited on me for quite a while. I'd actually done a little bit with it while I was waiting for my Learn To Paint kits to arrive because I'd wanted to do something until they got delivered. Of course, that meant that they ended up coming right after I started on this one, and so I put it aside for a couple of weeks while working through those. Armed with that knowledge, I went back to finish this off...sort of. Certainly, I made use of some

Honestly, between the two kits, this (#08907) was the one that I was really looking forward to. My early experiences with painting miniatures had already given me some sense of the very basic skills that the first kit was focused on, but the starkly painted look that the majority of my attempts at highlighting ended up with was a clear and blatant weakness that was holding back the quality of my work. As before, I approached this kit with minimal ego, trying to follow the in

I'm sure that everyone who's played Dungeons & Dragons, or even just browsed through the source books, has their favorites among the weird monsters. Beholders get a lot of love, as do mindflayers, the tarrasque, and for some reason, otyughs. Personally, I always had an irrational affection for intellect devourers. I can't explain it, but there's just something about the concept of a brain on legs hunting down intelligent creatures that always tickled my fancy. From the fi