Reply To: Are you spending too much? Frugal Hobby

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I’m not as much on the cheap side, but I think I’m cheaper than most hobby painters.

For paint, colored primers are less expensive per ounce than hobby paints. I paint to advanced tabletop, and start with colored primers and washes. Hobby paints only marginally improve the paint job, and you can’t see their effect on the tabletop, anyway. I even experimented with red craft paint in a dried GW paint pot, and it works fine for advanced tabletop.

Amazon sells cheap synthetic brushes, which you can use for most of the work a hobby brush can do. The tips will fail, but that also means you don’t have to do all that cleaning. Synthetic makeup brushes are great for drybrushing, but I’ve also used them for edge highlighting. Pleasantly surprised a cheap makeup brush will do a technique that I used to use a hobby brush for, and faster, at that.

Holiday sales by OLGS are a great source of inexpensive plastic hobby miniatures, and you can get free shipping. Blacklist Games (currently funding for their Lasting Tales KS) offers plastic miniatures for under $.50 each, though only in their current KS. Archon’s Dungeons and Lasers (KS starts in April sometime) is the least expensive plastic modular terrain. Battle Systems is inexpensive cardstock terrain. DriveThruRPG is a good source of papercraft terrain.

For basing, I use playground sand which is… um… free. 😀 Keep the brown nearly empty craft paint bottles around. Add a little water to them, shake, and you have a wash for basing!