Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Hi all,

I wanted to keep a record of my progress with learning to paint.

As a kid I bought Space Crusade, but I never painted them, mostly because I had to keep them hidden from my Mum.
I always regretted not painting them and my interest in all things WH40k has peaked again recently because of the Horus Heresy books and the Dawn of War computer games.

So, I fancied learning to paint, but didn't want to shell out tonnes of money on brand new mini's just to learn on. So a few ebay auctions later I got a copy of space crusade and here I am.

Natakue did a pretty good tutorial on you tube here. Which I did my best to follow, I think he's right GW washes are awesome, but he never highlighted the black cloth, which I didn't like. I don't actually like how the black has turned out on these guys, but I learned from it so that's good. I've pretty much stopped using pure black now, and always add a touch of grey to tone it down a bit.

My first painted mini's



Then I found this here tutorial on Alpha legion - which I thought looked great, plus I'd just finished reading legion.
It was about this time I read about wet blending and NMM. So here's my first stab at wet blending and 1 go at NMM...

About half way through i realised this style of painting wasn't really me, plus the commander's back pack went missing so I never finished them and will one day strip them and start again.



Finally in the last couple of days I painted these Ultra smurfs. I tried to do a lot of blending. First I tried layers, but the first guy looked like he had stripey power armour on, not a good look. Then I just went with a wet blending technique I've sort of made up. I need to get a flow improver as water isn't really cutting it.

Anyway i'm quite happy with these guys and feel i'm getting towards how I want to paint, although I'm not too happy with the bolters and feel the grey is a bit too stark against the 'black'



That's all for now, any C&C would be great.

Soooo, after watching this tutorial courtesy of Alexandra (Girl painting) on you tube I decided to have another go at layered highlighting.
I'm well happy with the results and feel I'm finding my style of painting. Even toying with buying some real mini's this weekend.

Wow excellent work!

Even as Ultrasmurfs, I really do like what youve done with them! Your style of painting really looks good on these old school models!
I gotta say that Im definitely looking forward to what you do on new models!


btw... Is that red a GW paint?

Thanks for the comments Ramos, it's good old fashioned blood red. I just mix in blobs of bad moon yellow for the highlights.

Wow maybe thats what Im seeing in it...

I couldnt place the color as it looked far too bright for Blood Red, but Bad Moonz explains it.
Looks awesome altogether!

And your doing NMM too, am i correct? Thats a technique that I never really got the hang of. Something you learned yourself? or a tutorial?

Having a go at NMM, when I first read about it I was fascinated by the idea.

Can't wait to try SENMM on the dreadnaught I think, but before I do i'm going to seek some advice as i'm not too sure how the lines should work.

We'll see.

If you are at that level of quality already on old so-so sculpted miniatures, I look forward to seeing what you can do with new, much nicer miniatures!

Awesome work.. love the colours..

I LOVE the old Space Crusade miniatures (and I'd LOVE to get ahold of a bunch of the missile launcher versions!) - and I LOVE what you've done with them!

Looking forward to more!

Good-looking work!!

I'll not soon forget my cousin-in-law for giving his old 100% complete SC box away.

Been a while.
Work has been crazy busy, I'm doing a degree in my spare time and Codemasters released F1, plus I needed to pluck up the courage to enter GW to buy some more paints. I way pluck up the courage it's more of a try to keep calm as they try to upsell some random stuff that I don't want.
e.g. I popped in yesterday to buy just 5 paints. The guy tried to get me to buy a collectors edition paint set or something, so annoying.

Anyway, I finished the fourth marine (with assault cannon) and then went for the commander, which I really enjoyed painting.
Had to learn some new things, painting eyes, hair, flesh tones and NMM gold.

Here's the results, C&C really welcome.







Changing tac, i've bought my first set of real GW minis - Striking scorpions (the GW guy naturally then tried to get me to buy some Dark Eldar).
Not sure whether to stick with good old green or maybe try a desert scheme. If I do green it'll be something natural like Catachan green.

TTFN

Hang

Thanks to this here tutorial, i've learned how to take a better photo

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/317430.page

If you haven't read it, then I highly recommend it...

Wowowow!!

I remember when you first posted pics of your alpha legion try, It was really good, but I must say I'm even more impressed with your ultramarines.

Great Job, and I agree with Legoburner, I'd really like to see your painting skills used on more recent models, I think it would be f g great!

Hey, thanks for the encouragement.

TBH i'm strugglign with the Striking scorpions I bought.

Read lots of post where people said they were fed up of seeing "rainbow" eldar. So I wanted to do something a bit more realistic.

Ah well, I'll keep trying.

I can't wait to see the striking Scorpions! The freehand on the shoulder of the SM sergeant is very nice looking.

_Tim?

Dakka is just great for getting encouragement to get on and paint, and it's even better because the tar-heads who make up our I.T. department haven't blocked it...yet

So i've finally finished my first 'proper' GW mini - apart from the base, I messed up a couple of times and the paint is a bit thick in places - I'll call him Dulux!







Please feedback, go nuts, be really strict - I want to improve and I find feedback invaluable, so please be as picky as you like.

Thanks all

Hang

awesome stuff, i have a load of the space crusade plastics sitting in a box, all the marines and a few space orks/gretchin, might get them painted now

If you happen to have a spare Chaos marine back pack that you don't need, could I have it? Mine still hasn't turned up despite pulling the lounge apart!

I'm still trying to build up the courage to paint the dreadnaught, it's a fantastic model IMO, although the stance is a tad boring. Maybe it could be my first conversion.

Let me know if you do paint your space crusade models, i'd be interested to see how you get on.

I don't think i have any of the chaos marines but i will check, i do have the dread and all weapons for it though, might be fun to paint up sometime I will chuck you a pm if i find one for you

Really impressed, its really nice to see your painting development over the growth of this thread

I think its a great painted mini, i love the shading on the stones and the edging on the armour it has a real "Guyver" look.

The only bit that doesnt look quite right to me is the lighter edging on the edge of the sword, it seems a bit off - but very minor and not going to be noticeable unless someone puts there head RIGHT against the chainsword!

P.S. LOVE the holster looks really "leathery"

Thanks for the comments, took a second look at the sword - it's one of those macro photography things where in real life it doesn't look that bright.

I am finding the whole macro photos do show up errors that would not be visible by naked eye and blending that looks smooth on the mini looks like blocks of colour, oh well.

So I thought I'd paint the next scorpion slightly differently and try a two tone thing...Here's what i've managed so far...
Again the greens don't look so contrasted in real life, ahhh well we'll see what happens.



i think i've wrecked my paint brush, as it was behaving very oddly. Kept splitting and splaying out, guess I need a new one.

your painting skills are impressive ,i also need to learn how to paint minis again, my techniques went out with the second edtion!

its inspiring to see your work come along makes me think i can do it!

Thanks Neil, hope you get back into it.
There's so much info out there now-a-days, the youtube videos by Les Bursley (AwesomePaintJob) and Alexandra (GirlPainting) have just been amazing and of course the inspiration of seeing other people's work on this forum is what keeps me interested.

Welll big update. Dunno why but I just wasn't happy with my Scorpions to date, also the primer had gone on really thick and had a chalky texture. So I decided to start over.

My lessons learned :-
Assemble mini first, then paint.

Decide on a colour scheme and experiment with which colours work with each other.

Do not assume you can paint over a poorly primed mini.

Now there's a question you see a lot of on here, priming Black or White?
With most questions of this nature there's pros and cons to both. Ultimately you have to make your own mind up, so i've decided to try a few different ways of painting my squad.

Here goes...

A quick pic of where I was...


The minis in a sealable bag of Acetone free nail polish remover...


The freshly scrubbed and dried and assemled squad


Undercoat - applied with brush due to bad experience before - notice 3 are white and 2 are black


Current position Stage1


1: I have applied a black ink wash - next stage I will paint scab red leaving the black lining
2: I painted scab red all over - next stage black ink wash
3: I painted scab red all over - next stage brown ink wash or black lining haven't decided
4: I painted scab red all over - next stage - black lining and clean up
5: I painted scab red leaving the black lining (This took 5 times longer than the previous 4 put togther) - next stage re-apply basecoat

I didn't think I'd be a black undercoat convert, but I gotta admit, i'm tempted.
So there you have it, if nothing else you can see the difference of a black or white undercoat on scab red.

Hangfire for now

The step by step pics are really helpfull!

Definately going to hold to the black undercoat for my Emperors Children!

Stage 2 complete



1: Complete waste of time doing the black ink wash first. I found it nigh on impossible to paint the basecoat covering all the white areas and leaving the black lines showing. So the red ended up covering the ink lines.
2: How I normally paint - has added some definition, but not enough
3: Added a small amount of definition, but no where near enough
4: I like the colour, but not looking forward to lining this dude
5: loving it, the colour looks good and I think the lines work better than model 1 with the ink wash.

I think i've learned something!

Where are your CSMs Incurus?

4 & 5 definately seem to have come out the best!

Had no time for painting! Halloween is the social epex of my year Soon!

My order from Wayland finally arrived yesterday, with 2 new paint brushes.
Army painter regiment brush and the Kolinsky masterclass - I have to say they kick the out of GW brushes hands down.

If you've not thought about brushes, then I highly recommend watching this

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/320475.page

Thanks Les, you the man.

Anyway, i've made some progress on numbers 4 and 5 from above.

here



Thanks to the new kolinsky I was able to have a stab at black lining, which I think went quite well for my first go. It's easy to miss bits though and I still think I prefer painting black then basecoating to leave black lines behind.

So take a guess, which one is 4 (painted black lines) and which one is 5 (black lines left showing)

Noice! i'm liking it so far, i like the blending on the sm, and i really dig the green scorpion, that's cool. inspired me to pick up my old eldar

@PrivateHerbert - thanks for the comments, shame the green one ended up in the bag of nail polish remover!

Anyway - I've finally got around to finishing number 5

As before I'd really appreciate some feedback, anything you can think of to help me improve.

Looks great! My only (small) suggestion would be to get rid of the orange hieroglyphic on the chain sword, orange and green are a bit to contrasty, it works well for the armour and helmet but I don't really like it on the sword. I love how the eyes seem like they are glowing.