Kemet

Kemet - my second project

It took me a while, but it's finally finished. My second painting project - Kemet. I feel that experience gained during my first XCom project helped me a lot and while I still need to learn a lot I think the result is considerably better. Also investing in my toolbox helped a lot.

Since my natural artistic skills are quite poor, I decided to be a copycat and looked up colour scheme inspirations. I decided to paint my minis in a similar way to those in the following pictures: soldiers, creatures.

I choose Kemet because I felt it offers decent (but not top-shelf) mini quality, which is suitable for my skill level. Overall I think it was a good choice, however paining 12 identical soldiers in each army was quite tedious. It was much more fun to paint the unique creatures as they offered more variety and allowed to test various techniques on a smaller sample.

Toolbox

 

Airbrush

This time I had an airbrush at my disposal. I bought the Adler AD-7770 model for ~40$ for starters. Together I bought the Technic AS-186 compressor. The compressor I got first didn't work properly - the engine did not turn back on when pressure dropped to 3 bar as it should. I learned that this is a frequent issue in this model, fortunately the store quickly exchanged it to a new one, that is working just fine.

Airbrushing takes practice. The most difficult part is getting the pain thinned right, otherwise you'll either flood your mini or clog the airbrush. Also cleaning the airbrush is quite tedious, so in the end it doesn't save as much time while painting as I hoped it would. I used it for applying the primer, base colour and varnish.

Brushes

I was quite unhappy with my Italeri synthetic brushes (the tip was getting blunt very fast) and decided to try out the Army Painter Wargamer brushes. Boy, how I wash I had those sooner! The difference is enormous! Finally I can get all the details right and the brush stays usable after painting 50 mins. I primarily used the Wargamer Detail brush.

Washes

In addition to my Vallejo washes I bought the Army Painter Quickshade. It's recommended for my next planned project - Zombicide: Black Plague, so I bought and decided to try it out on a few of the creatures. It's an interesting alternative - behaves quite differently as it's based on an oil paint and is very glossy. Because of that I would only used it for covering a whole mini as a final step. If you want to apply individual washes to various areas and have more control of the whole process/details or apply highlights afterwards, then it's easier to use an acrylic wash.

Lessons learned

• Good brushes make a huuuge difference 
• Painting 12 same minis is less fun and a worse learning opportunity than paining smaller sets of unique ones
• Getting the paint thinned properly is tricky - especially for airbrush. Keep your paint thick for drybrushing.
• Vallejo washes aren't very good and create a "patchy" result. Since I bought a whole stash, I'll try them out with added glaze medium - heard that helps with the flow.
• Army Painter Quickshade is an interesting and practical solution if you want a single thick wash on your whole mini.
• I need to master wet blending, to get smoother gradients.
• Varnishes and Primers should be applied with an airbrush, as that gives better coverage for edges than when applying with a brush. Also the Vallejo matt varnish needs a really good shake, otherwise it's quite glossy.

Result

The whole army

I know - I need to make the pictures by day when the light is better :)

The cannon fodder

I have a first admirer of my collection - cool :)

The elephant is my favourite. The stripes on the sphinx are quite poor, I need to master painting stripes :) I learned that it's always better to apply the light colour first and then fill the dark one (as it has better coverage and you need less layers).

Creatures - they were the most interesting to paint. The dragon has the Army Painter Quickshade applied, the others Vallejo Washes.

Playing with fire - my son is about to sweep the minis from the table :D I hope someday he'll join me in the painting (and playing) process.

From behind

These little bastards took the most time to paint, but it was worth the effort :) I think the yellow ones use too similar colours (yellow/gold/brown) - I believe more contrasting colours would be better.

What's next

I found an absolutely great Tutorial by Sorastro on how to paint Zombicide Black Plague. I decided to pick that as my next project. The minis looks great and everything is explained step by step. Including techniques, wash/color comparisons and appendix of all the paints used. I believe this will be a great opportunity to learn some tricks and see how more experience painters go through the whole process. I already bought all the paints and am ready to start my zombie adventure, so stay tuned for my next blog entry!

XCom Board Game Painted Minatures

How I got into miniature painting

Playing board games was a hobby of mine for the last few years. Since that typically requires a group of people (unless you're playing solo, which I also sometimes do ;) ) I decided to fill in the gap and use the time when I'm home alone to try out miniature painting. This allows me to spend more time in the hobby doing other things than simply reading reviews and buying more games :) Also giving my games a "personal" touch is a very cool idea!

When I was a kid I used to assemble plastic models, but when I was done the resulting models consisted more of glue than the original plastic. And my soldier painting technique was simply dipping the figure in a green paint jar. This childhood experience however gave me a very basic knowledge of model assembly and painting. Since then I always wanted to atone for my gluey sins and try doing it the proper way.

XCom project

For my first set of miniatures I decided to pick XCom. It's a cool real time cooperative game with a very original mechanic. And most importantly there aren't that many miniatures inside and the ships seemed to be quite straight forward to paint.

I used Vallejo's "Game Color" acrylic paints together with their primer, washes and varnish. When I was starting I didn't have an airbrush, so everything has been painted with a brush. I only used my newly acquired airbrush for the final layer of varnish.

Here are the minis after painting:

I'm not an artistic person and don't have a very good aesthetic touch, so when picking colors I was searching for inspiration in the internet. So all credits for the color scheme go to the authors of these pictures: interceptors, ufos, soldiers. My minis seem to have come out a big lighter than the ones that were my inspiration.

Learnings

The biggest difficulty I have encountered was that the primer was bubbling and the coverage was very poor. I don't know if its my technique (I used a brush) or a faulty product batch (the bottle arrived with the lid skewed), but I found in the internet that I'm not the only one that experienced this problem with Vallejo's grey primer. For my next minis I'll use an airbrush which should resolve the issue.

Primer bubbling unfortunately left visible marks in a few places on the minis. I can only blame myself for being lazy, not washing the primer off and buying a different one :)

My second mistake was mixing a color for the body armor and then forgetting how I created the mix. Because of that when I needed to make some minor corrections I had a hard time recreating the same color. I should have either used an existing paint, saved some of the mixed one in a bottle or make sure I know the exact proportions.

Next error was applying too much varnish beneath the figure which resulted in an uneven surface. I used a brush for the varnish - starting with the next set I'll only be using an airbrush, so that shouldn't be an issue any more.

And lastly I still need to learn to be more patient and precise. When carefully looking at the final result you can see that there are a few spots that I missed. Also the colors came out a bit different than I expected - I guess that's a matter of practice and getting more experience with mixing colors, applying washes and using other advanced techniques.

Summary

All in all I think it was a great experience and the final result is quite decent taking into account it's my first batch. Because of limited time the whole project took me four weeks. I can't wait to get my fingers on the next batch of minis. I still think I need more practice around the basics, so as my next project I want to pick Kemet. The minis there are quite interesting, but their total count isn't overwhelming. This will be a next step on my road to getting ready for the first league - Imperial Assault, War of the Rings etc. :)

If you have any questions or tips for what to improve, let me know!