My Mission

The purpose of this page is to teach new painters the techniques for painting large quantities of rank and file figures in the least amount of time. Individual figures that you want to paint to a higher standard will use the same principles but require more care and time. There is no reason that anyone, after a little instruction, cannot paint to a high tabletop standard. I'm actually getting back into painting, in part because my 5-year old sons are interested in them, so as I go back and revisit techniques, I thought I'd update this page as I go and learn new things. The miniature you'll see here come mostly from the Warhammer Fantasy, Warhammer 40K, Confrontation, and Warmachine games, but the techniques can apply to miniatures from any range and from any scale.

News and Updates

1/31/10

January's commitment completed. I finished my Trygon and Tyrant Guard brood in addition to the details on my Baneblade. Next up, a Devilfish, a squad of Firewarriors, and a Necron Monolith.

1/16/10

I live!!! After a 7 month break (mostly spent playing Wizard 101), I have picked up my brushes once again. I got 'suggested' into a 2010 painting resolution challenge. The goal, to paint one force organization unit each month for the year. I think I can do that. With the release of the Tyranid codex, I picked up a Trygon and need to finish off some other Tyranid units I've had in the project box as well as a couple of Tau units. So, stay tuned. Hopefully we'll see some new stuff soon.

6/6/09

Basically done. Might add some washes here and there on the pistons, but I think that's it.

6/4/09

Making good progress. Benjamin got all of his skeletons assembled and I'm in the home stretch with the Soul Grinder. As of Wednesday, I've highlighted the skin and got through most of the face ... need to give the teeth some Devlan Mud and then another highlight. Tried out the shin plates for fit ... but still need to give the edging some Devlan Mud and clean up the black. After that, I think all I have left is the sword, the tubing, and highlighting the sliver on the chassis and claw.

5/31/09

My next challenge. Matthew and Benjamin earned their orange belts today at their dojo and as a reward, I told them I'd buy each a small boxed set. Benjamin chose a set of Tomb King skeletons and Matthew wanted a Soul Grinder (he has to give me $15 to make up the difference). We picked these up this afternoon. My goal is to get the Soul Grinder assembled and painted by next week. We got back from a neice's graduation party at 10:00 PM and 90 minutes later, we have most of the subassemblies clipped out and assembled. The goal is to finish cleaning up the pieces tomorrow morning, prime, and start working on basecoats.

5/28/09

Sentinel done. Woo hoo.

Hopefully my K&J order for 500 magnets will arrive tomorrow. Also, my boys test for their orange belts on Saturday and I've told them that if they earn their belts, we'll go to Gamescape and then can pick out a $35 boxed set of figures.

5/24/09

Sentinel is all magnetized and ready for priming. The How To can be found here. All in all, it was a good experience and the kit goes together very easily. Thanks Games Workshop.

5/23/09

Another week and more Imperial Guard stuff; this time, one of the new Sentinels. I wanted to give magnetizing it a go, so a couple hours and 38 magnets later, I have a fully magnetized Sentinal ready for final assembly and priming.

5/17/09

Got in an hour and a half at Gamescape to finish off the 6 WOTR Warg Riders. The lighting wasn't great, so I hope I highlighted everything in the right colors. In any case, I think I'm going to call them done.

5/16/09

I think I'm calling it good and moving onto other projects. Here is the finished model with all of the options.

5/15/09

This has certainly been an interesting month; I've been working out of my normal comfort zone on a couple of fronts. First up were my projects assembling and magnetizing the Land Raider and Baneblade, my first real attempts at serious weapon and wargear swapability. Then I took on the Barbed Hierodule, my first Forgeworld model and to-date, the biggest model I've worked on. This weekend I should finish painting a Valkyrie, my first real vehicle, which was assembled with fully magnetized hardpoints. Lastly, I took on 66 WOTR Orc and painted them for my LGS. Good stuff all around.

5/10/09

Crew finished and glued into their seats.

5/7/09

Got everything assembled and primed. Here is the figure with the components (engines, wings, etc) test fitted together. I'll work on the details tomorrow and the weekend.

5/5/09

Continuing to work on the Valkyrie. The major components are assembled now and the interior of the cabin is done. I figure that I should be able to finish assembly by Friday, so that I can prime on Saturday afternoon.

5/3/09

Dropped off the second set of 30 Orcs this morning. Hopefully they'll be based by next Saturday's Pizza & Painting night so that I can finish them off. I also need to take pictures of the entire set. In total, this makes 318 figures completed since the middle of October 2008. I also picked up my Valkyrie kit and have started work assembling, painting, and magnetizing it.

5/2/09

First set of 30 Orcs turned in to Gamescape this morning for basing. Hoping I can turn in the next set of 30 tomorrow.

5/1/09

Trying to get through as many WOTR Orcs as possible this weekend, so that Andre has figures to base. Once they're based, I can always go back and highlight the figures ... I think it's better to deliver partial sets to keep the pipeline full, rather than deliver all 60 at once and jam everyone's schedule. Here are 30 Orcs drying on the painting table after their Paynes Grey wash.

As expected, I'm putting together my notes and writing a how-to on painting the WOTR Orcs

4/25/09

Finished and based. Overall, this was a really nice change of pace for me. It's the largest model I've worked with to-date and my first experience with Forgeworld resin. All in all, it's been a great learning experience. If you read through the log, you'll also notice that I didn't use much in terms of paint. I used a red series for the carapace and highlighting, a pink series for the end of the bio-cannons, and a couple of other colors for they eyes and teeth. Everything else was a wash/stain over a colored primer. So it's nice to see the technique works on larger models too.

4/23/09

It's coming along nicely. If all goes well, I'll finished it by tomorrow night, 2 weeks after I picked it up and ready to bring with me to Pizza & Painting night at Gamescape.

4/18/09

The Hierodule is coming along slowly but as planned. I finished assembly this morning sans base and after the joins have the morning to cure, I'll wash the entire model with Raw Umber tonight. If you want to follow my progress, my WIP article is, Assembling and Painting a Forgeworld Barbed Hierodule

Here's the washed figure on a drying plate. This is by far the largest figure I've ever washed like this and I think it turned out OK. Once it drys, I'll have to go back with a smaller brush and get at all the little pits that didn't fill with wash.

4/15/09

Tax day!!! Anyway, making slow progress on my first Forgeworld model, a Barbed Hierodule. I got the legs pinned this evening with the intention of having everything assembled by Friday night so that I can prime Saturday morning, which will give me the weekend to paint.

4/12/09

Posted two new articles, both related to making vehicle weapons swappable. The first one is Making Swappable Land Raider Sponson Weapons and the second is Magnetizing Your Baneblade. Both are works in progress, but they've turned out OK so far.

Here are two of my current 3 projects.

4/11/09

Things have been slow on the painting front ... I'm getting killed at work and what little free time I have, I'm using to rest. However, that's not to say that I've been idle. I've been assembling my Land Raider Redeemer and got my first set of swappable sponson weapons completed.

I'm also in the final stages of assembling a Baneblade and adding some magnets to it to make it a little more flexible. I've magnetize the two lascannon turrets, plan to magnetize the side skirts and sponsons, as well as the main gun. I'll get some pics of that project posted when I'm finished and happy with the results. I also got my 3 Tyrant Guard cleaned up and prepped for priming, AND I picked up a Barbed Heirodule from Endgame today. Now I just have to figure out how to clean the sucker up, trim it, and prep it for painting.

3/22/09

Got the whole family down to Pizza & Painting night at Gamescape North. My wife is working on a pair of Harlequins, the lad in the lower right corner is putting brush to 12 Khorne Berkzerkers, and my other son worked on a trio of Space Marines. In the upper left hand corner, I have 60 Mordor Orcs I'm helping the store paint for Kublacon.

3/16/09

Painting .... going so .... slowly .... at least I got my 9 stealth suits assembled and primed this weekend.

3/13/09

The Farstrike Battlesuit Force starts to take shape.

3/8/09

Finished assembling 12 Khorne Berzerkers for my boys and cleaned up 9 XV-8 Crisis suits and a pair of Forgeworld XV-88 Crisis suits for my next project. Endgame is setting up a special Apocalypse bonus round connected to the Finish-an-Army-Challenge. I'm thinking that I can crank out a Tau Farstrike Battlesuit Force + a Nighthunter Stealth Group, for a total of 20 figures (~1,200 points). That's the plan anyways. So much for taking a break.

3/7/09

The Finish-an-Army-Challenge ends today and it feels a little anticlimatic in that there was no defining point where I just felt, "Whew, it's over". Maybe because I still have backlog on the workbench. Today, we're only judging Block 3, so there is no chance to put out the entire army for display. I figure that over the last 5 months, I've completed 3,100 points of Tyranids in 138 figures. That feels pretty good.

As it turns out, I got an award for Player's Choice. The $25 award went towards a box of Khorne Berzerkers for the lads.

I also got to play my first game of 5th edition. Lots of fun with a nod to Adan who kindly offered a low stress game to learn some of the mechanics. The boys also got to play and roll lots of dice.

3/5/09

Less than 48 hours to go. One last night of painting before Block 3 judging ... and I decide to add a figure ... the Zoanthrope in the foreground [smacks head] Oh well, I need it for the game on Saturday. Here are the lads, waiting for the glue on the static grass to dry. The Zoanthrope should get sand on the base before I go to bed and then it will get a couple of hours of drying time tonight.

3/1/09

Six more days until the end of the Finish An Army Challenge (check the log to see latest progress). I'm in the home stretch and am grateful to have gotten in hours of very productive painting. Last night alone, I got 4.5 hours at Gamescape. In the meantime, one of my sons, Benjamin was drybrushing and washing some Plague Marines and my wife was working on a Wood Elf Sorceress.

2/27/09

My last block of Tyranids are coming along much slower than expected, in part because I've been playing a lot of Spore. The space stage sucks up waaaaay more time than the earlier stages. This has to be a big painting weekend for me as we only have next week to finish everything off. If I can stay away from Spore tonight and be really productive tomorrow (the Gamescape Pizza and Painting night), I think I can close most of the gap with where I need to be.

I bought 48 Necron Warriors in a swap, but when the arrived, they didn't have the green rods. The seller swore he had included them, I couldn't find them, but that's neither here nor there. I needed to find 48 replacements. I found some E-bay shops selling them for $10 per 20 rods, but I'll be darned if I fork out $30 for them. So I stopped by Dollhouses and Trains, my local dollhouse and train store (go figure) and found a package of them by Plastruct. For $5.60, you get 8 1 foot sections of 1/8 acrylic rod. I picked up the red rods, but they also had green, blue, and yellow. now to cut them to size.

2/15/09

Still struggling to get things painted. Activity at work has picked up and I'm coming home more tired that usual. However, I thought I'd summarize some notes from a forum thread I started at Librarium Online and try to define, what constitutes an "average" paint job?

On the painting front, I finished my test board from my Citadel Realm of Battle set. I think it turned out adequately and the process is pretty quick. Expect to see a how to in the near future.

2/5/09

Wrote a quick article on displaying, storing, and transporting your figures and using test figures.

2/4/09

I've spent a couple of days noodling over my Land Raider Redeemer and how to get the most versatility out of it. The sponson weapons are the tricky part. I want to make them interchangeable, but the limiting factor is the post that holds the weapons. You get two sets of weapons in the Redeemer kit: hurricane bolters and the flamers, but only one set of posts. I don't think magnetizing the connection points will work as you'd have to rotate the weapon to get them out and the magnets won't hold strongly enough to allow you to rotate them back in place. I think I'm going to try a pin assembly where I use a piece of round tube as the mounting post, and then drop a pin straight through the top of the sponson, through the mounting post, and down past the bottom of the sponson to hold it in place. I have to make some measurements and do some experiments first to see how it works, but expect a tutorial to come out of this.

2/2/09

Now that the painting frenzy is over, I can take a step back, get stuff cleaned up and organized. I'm still committed to getting my Tyranids painted up for Block 3, but I have plenty of time, as long as I make continuous progress. I'd also like to get the first Realm of Battle board done so that I can get a good sense for what it looks like, and then there are the 4 vehicles to assemble.

2/1/09

Can you believe it? I just did an inventory of painted and unpainted figures. I probably have over 10,000 points of fully painted or "tabletop ready" (e.g., I'm not done with them, but they're probably better quality than a lot of figures out there) Warhammer 40K figures and just played my first games in years. There are a total of 345 fully painted figures in the count. Prior to 2008, all I had was a dreadnaught, a chaplain, and some Eldar, though I did sent 80 of my marines to someone else to paint. Still a pretty good dent in the backlog.

1/31/09

Don't have much progress to report. I did get my Tyranid Warriors primed and I got some of my Ork special characters to an acceptable level for today's Apocalypse game. Unfortunately, I will be bringing 5 unprimed figures, but they will be the first to be removed. Five out of 155 isn't so bad. I'll get pictures up later. Once the Apocalypse game is over, the sense of urgency over the Orks is over and I can get back to my Block 3 figures.

I also did some work on a single Realm of Battle square to see how my envisioned process works out. I need to highlight the base color and do the ridges, but I should have some process pics up soon.

My first game of Warhammer 40K 5th edition (really first game since 2nd Edition) and it happens to be a 40,000 point Apocalypse battle at Endgame. Army composition rules allowed for only 1/3 of total points from Apocalypse (legendary units, Apocalyse formations etc). The remaining 2/3 of the points had to come from the normal force organization chart. Overall, this seemed to work out nicely in that the bulk of units weren't super heavy units. Ground rules were simple, 1) have fun, 2) don't be a dick. Pretty simple and a whole lot of fun. Check out my pics and commentary.

1/22/09

Stompa is progressing along nicely and should be ready in time for next week's Apocalypse battle at Endgame. I'm also working on a Stompa construction log.

1/20/09

Posted a new article on Assembly Line Painting, the lessons learned from 3 frenzied months of massive figure production.

1/17/09

Woo hoo. Block 2 judging took place today and I got to take home a prize for most points, driven by finished models, a plethora of extra units, and a custom objective marker. Also placed second again for People's Choice, which I consider pretty good considering the other armies. All in all, it was great fun to see some really stunning and well put together armies and get some time to prep figures. Now, onto Block 3 and some Ork stuff for the 1/31 Apocalpyse game. Here are the finished products from this Block:

I've also updated the Guides page with my "how to" article for Ork Boyz and Ork Deffkoptas. I'm in the process of writing an article on Assembly Line Painting, which hopefully will get posted this weekend, as well as some new photos of my Stompa-in-progress.

1/15/09

Making good progress. I'm nearly finished with my 99 Orks ... just putting some finishing touches on and they'll be ready for sealing and grassing. In the wings are a Painboy, Mad Doc Grotsnik, Boss Snikrot, and a Mek with Kustom Force Field. I'll be able to field Da Green Tide at the next Apocalypse game. Hopefully I'll get some new pictures up soon.

1/6/09

I finally did it. I bought the Realm of Battle. I found it on an E-bay store for $230 including shipping. Incidentally, the seller was Gorilla Tactics from whom I'd already received a quote. So, it should be here in a couple of days and then I'll write up an article on painting my new terrain boards. Additionally, I've archived some of my old news posts so that the main page loads faster.

1/5/09

Another good painting weekend. Finished the flesh highlights on 99 Ork Boyz and Nobz and I'm getting ready for eyes, tongues, and teeth.

1/1/09

First post of the year. Here are two AOBR Ork Boyz that are the test figures for the 75 other Orks on the painting table.