Crazyredcoat's Crazy Compendium of Collected Creativity
"What do they know of the Wall or the wolfswood or the barrows of the First Men?"
And so, after much time, the Umber Berserkers are finished, and what have I learned?
The unit all ranked up on their tray.The first, and most important, is to NOT rush! My excitement to get this unit, and my ASoIaF minis led me to rushing to get paint on them that made me miss all sorts of little details that I’d normally get to in the model prep. This is most obvious with mould lines as you can almost certainly find all over these chaps. With other minis I’ve dealt with these with a nice sharp blade and the GW scraper tool (other scraping tools are available), but I just had a quick look these chaps and thought ‘good enough’. This was not the case.
More angles of the lads.Second is the painting issues I had along the way. One of the main reasons these chaps took so long is frustration of the shininess of several stages of paint work. I am still unsure as to why certain stages decided to go shiny, but such is life. The lesson here is that it never really hurts to have some way of matting down paints or even some matte varnish for an after coat (something that I will be doing later for these chaps).
Yet more angle.A final note is playing to your strengths. While I know many people can paint in batches of 10 or more, I’m just not that good. I am better at individual minis and it’s actually quite tricky for me to paint another way. I originally wanted to do all 12 at once, then realised that I wanted to do the banner separately, then very quickly got bored of painting 11 minis colour by colour as time when by. This might not be a problem for everyone, but I am one of those people that once I’m bored I’m done for the day. In the end I painted them by rank which worked quite well or me and meant that I could stick to a schedule while still playing to my strengths as a painter. Hopefully they have turned out alright and while I am not 100% happy with them, the fact that they are a bit rough and ready, as an aesthetic, works nicely in my favour.
The massed Lloyd shot. Does this still only count as one?
A good honest entry. We’ve all had models we’ve rushed to paint and not done as good a job of it as we know we could. What stages did the shininess turn up, did you notice? I had a batch of minis recently that did the same and it turned out I hadn’t shaken the wash up enough.
The first, and major one, was my Agrax Earthshade problem that might just be a mislabeled pot, but with some of the later minis, when I applied the Lahmian Medium to dull it down, it too died with a shine, so I am wondering if it had more to do with a bad interaction with something on the minis. It was only two of them of the last batch of four, though, so I haven’t gotten a definite answer as to what went wrong. I did test the shaking idea, because my brother suggested that, too, but it didn’t seem… Read more »
Working out your ‘effective batch size’ is a lesson well learned. As you do more of the ASoIaF minis, you might find you start to bump it up a bit as you get a better feel for the sculpts.
We’ll find out when I get stuck into my hoardes of Lannister Guardsmen and Stark Sworn Swords… 😛