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So I've been working on a converted Deff Dread for my Ork army, finally getting some paint on it after leaving it in half-converted limbo for about a year or so. It's the second "big" model I've painted since I picked up the hobby again, and I've noticed that while these 'bigger' models, somewhere along the way, I always got to a point where I just went:

Oh god, I have completely ruined this model.

It usually happens when I'm halfway through getting the base colours done, at that point where half of the miniature is shoddily coloured and the other half is unappealing black primer. It's at that moment I look upon all those gribbly details, every little rivet and wire, and I am filled with pure dread by the thought of getting all of them painted somewhat decently, whilst the things I already painted suddenly look terrible, with all sorts of tiny mistakes popping up at every surface.

But despite all that, I keep going, pushing onwards in the desperate hope that it'll turn out alright in the end; and fortunately, it all eventually did thus far.

Weirdly, this never happens when I'm painting a smaller model. When I mess up one of the regular Boyz, Nobz, or even the Warboss, I'm always confident that I can still fix things and it'll all be fine. Why my brain chooses to spazz out when I'm working on a bigger model is beyond me.

Have you ever had a moment where you just went "I've totally ruined it" while painting a model? And if so, did it work out in the end, or did the model end up taking a bath of Simple Green?

30 heresy marines/first attempt at yellow armour/looked good at first/not so good the next day/worse the next/lots of swearing/acetone free nail polish remover bath time/start again!

I have reached that point with a Soul Grinder I was painting about a month ago. I was applying highlights to the torso and somewhere between my two year old distracting me constantly and just life around me...he started to look very orange on one side and not so much on the other and then I had my o moment. Haven't touched him since and hang my head when I see him in my display case...knowing that bath is coming soon

Years ago, painting Space Wolves: I had sprayed them with whatever SW Grey spray there was at the time (Wolf Grey?), then painted up everything else on the model, and was going back to neaten up anywhere I had gotten a bit of paint on the SW armor. After doing the tidying up on two squads of Grey Hunters, I discovered that the Space Wolf grey paint from the pot was a different color than the SW Grey paint from the spray can when it dried!

(I even called a friend working at GW at the time and confirmed it! It was slightly lighter and more blue).

Last time I painted SW. Gave up on the army and focused on Orks.

I was trying to finish up a Leman Russ for a tournament the next day, and was staying up way too late trying to get it done. I let the decals cure while I got some sleep, and stumbled out of bed in the morning to seal it and finish it off. I gave it the first spray, and woke up real fast as I realized I'd picked up a can of primer instead.

For me its usually the point where I have a model painted to about the level of what will laughably be referred to as my ability..

And _then_ Some insanity takes over and I try painting eyes or other such detail and end up with a model that looks decent, but looks like its on drugs, and end up stripping and restarting..

Eyes. All goes well until I bugger up painting the eyes.

I run into that alot lately because I am experimenting with the style where models just get a coat of all the base colors, and then all the shading is done with washes (ala the Armypainter style).

I now get what all you guys on Dakka said when you touted the old Devlan Mud as "talent in a bottle". My minis always look so great when done, but man, do they look underwhelming right up to the point of the wash implementation, when for years and years I painted everything with 2-3 layers of shading.

So, yeah. I still get that same feeling after nearly 20 years of painting.

Thinned a Carroburough Shade to much. Thought it went well... until I turnt the model around 10 minutes later... It seeped down the back, staining the paintjob.

I have painted and striped a Necron Overlord over a dozen times over the course of 2 years. He's still sitting in my bin unpainted.

I added some weathering to my Taihkromn Ryus model... He does not look any better. He looks like the Statue of Liberty he's so green now.

Happens to me anytime I try to paint literally ANYTHING. I paint at a glacially slow pace, and I'm never happy at all with what I do, so I just literally stare at the model after it's done and I just see nothing but mistake after mistake. Probably why my Guard still aren't finished after having started the army 5+ years ago.

I thought I picked up the clear coat can once, instead it was white primer.

Spent about 2 days on a Blood Angel's captain. I was really happy with the job I did on him, I was extremely precise. The finishing touch was to add an OSL glow from his power sword with my airbrush... Instantly regretted it. The effect worked, but blurred and bleached out a lot of the crisp edges that made him pop. I tried to bring the definition back with some more shadows, but I don't think he ever looked quite the same.

Also: melted an X-Wing Z95 Headhunter trying to strip it in Biostrip. Biostrip has always been great for stripping GW, and I've seen people online use it for X-Wing, but for me it ended badly. Just glad that I opted to only strip one ship and not all of them as a batch.

Also sprayed my entire Infinity collection with with Army Painter primer, in an effort to get it all painted. It looked great at arms length, but once I started to paint, I realised there was some kind of texture preventing paints and washes from sitting properly. Under the microscope, this is what they looked like So I had to strip all my Infinity stuff, which was about 30 models, and about a million little bits that broke off in the process. It took me weeks to get them all back to the stage where they could be repainted.

Z-95 are disposable.

I put a lot of work painting a chapter master's torso, and just as I was putting finishing touches on it, it popped out of my fingers, bounced on the desk, right into an open pot of paint.

Almost every model I paint gets to that stage at some point

Fortunately I manage to pull a minor miracle and they end up looking presentable in the end

I repainted my Warriors of Arnor for Lord of the Rings SBG like 5 times...the default green...then purple and tan...then black...then purple and tan again...and now I've finally settled on grey and blue-grey.

 Smacks wrote:
Also sprayed my entire Infinity collection with with Army Painter primer, in an effort to get it all painted. It looked great at arms length, but once I started to paint, I realised there was some kind of texture preventing paints and washes from sitting properly. Under the microscope, this is what they looked like

Spoiler:

So I had to strip all my Infinity stuff, which was about 30 models, and about a million little bits that broke off in the process. It took me weeks to get them all back to the stage where they could be repainted.

Ah yes, the dreaded priming in high humidity problem. Ugh, I've done that a couple of times in the past until I learned to check the humidity level in weather reports!

Yep, was finishing up a Great Unclean One. He looked pretty great, but I thought he needed just a little bit more. Washed him with some Caliban Green and he looked terrible. Basically 5 hours down the drain. Luckily, I was able to fix him up to a decent standard, but still, I felt totally ruined.

Yeah, I did the primer mistake a few times too. Fortunately I think the worst ones I did were Tyranids and Undead where the extra texture isn't such a big deal.

I hate working on faces and getting alllll the way to the end and then cocking up a detail. I've abandoned eyes on models it got to be so frustrating.

A not quite painting mistake but very much an "Oh god, what have I done" came when basecoating a vehicle the other night. I had five bottles of the color on hand and thought it would end up being mildly overkill. Somehow despite handling many of them it never dawned on me how big they were, and it wasn't until the first bottle was half-empty and I was only "mostly" done with one vehicle (of a dozen this size...with another 10 only slightly smaller beyond that before all is done) that I began to realize how badly I'd underestimated the supplies required for the project.

Fortunately as the world's slowest painter, there's plenty of time to get more paint in before it becomes an issue so it's far more recoverable than screwing up the shading on a model's hair trying to fix a detail on a hat...

 Beta wrote:
Eyes. All goes well until I bugger up painting the eyes.

Then do what I do. Paint the eyes first, then paint the face around them. That way if you screw up the eyes, you're not out all the work on the rest of the model - you haven't done it yet!

 Smacks wrote:


Also sprayed my entire Infinity collection with with Army Painter primer, in an effort to get it all painted. It looked great at arms length, but once I started to paint, I realised there was some kind of texture preventing paints and washes from sitting properly. Under the microscope, this is what they looked like

Spoiler:

So I had to strip all my Infinity stuff, which was about 30 models, and about a million little bits that broke off in the process. It took me weeks to get them all back to the stage where they could be repainted.

man looks like it turned into salt :/

 edbradders wrote:
Almost every model I paint gets to that stage at some point

Fortunately I manage to pull a minor miracle and they end up looking presentable in the end

me too
every model i paint goes through what i call "the ugly phase"...
it all comes together in the end, though


my true "Oh God, what have I done?" moments don't come from the paint, but from the rare occassion that i have dropped or broken a nearly completed mini...
those moments are heart-breaking, and gut-wrenching!!!
luckily, it has only happened a couple of times...
sadly, it always seems to happen on a mini that i can't just put aside in disgust, but have to fix...

the worst ones were the Forge World Titan Tech-Priest that one of my dreadlocks knocked off the painting table the night before a painting contest...
that thing exploded into many pieces, even though it hit the carpet...
fixed him, and got Second Place...

the other was my first contribution to the Clash for a Cure charity auction...
my pirate captain Braodside Bart hit the Mexican tile floor, and chipped all to hell...
fixed him up, and got him sent off to Texas on time...
he turned out so good that the organizer of the event bought him

the most recent one was after making an awesome sacrificial blade conversion for a Heretek custom build...
the arm sat on my desk happily for a couple of months, and as soon as i picked it up to get started on the painting, the blade caught on my shirt and snapped :(

sick to the stomach kind of moments, for sure...

cheers
jah

Waaaay back when I was first trying out painting miniatures, I went and painted all my Genestealers blue then decided to add some flesh tone because, hey, they're human-hybrids. 'Course, my execution of the idea was to just slather skin pink blotches on top of the dark blue without any attempts at blending or anything.


I mean, he was already pretty gaudy since I apparently had to use every single color we had, but the skin tone took it over the edge and I don't think I've painted a Genestealer since.

I just had one, where I was painting my librarian, who had a nice back banner. I painted everything seperate then assembled, and only after all was said and done, did I realize I had left the ribbon on the bottom of the banner blank, and the pose of his force sword and the crest on his helmet made it pretty much impossible to get back there to write anything better than random squiggles.

I painted an entire 2000 point black templar army then didn't like the white so i repainted it all in my own chapter which follows black templars lol.

Currently painting Kingdom Death Monster, every single layer and new paint is me second guessing myself as the mini quality is so good I don't want to mess up.

leopard wrote:
For me its usually the point where I have a model painted to about the level of what will laughably be referred to as my ability..

And _then_ Some insanity takes over and I try painting eyes or other such detail and end up with a model that looks decent, but looks like its on drugs, and end up stripping and restarting..

Ditto, not usually eyes but detail, usually a terrible attempt to hand draw a motif. I should probably start an ork army were badly drawn symbols are a thing of beauty!

I've luckily avoided painting eyes by carefully using shades on my marine faces. Unless you're a pro I just don't think its worth trying to paint eyes. I've seen averagely painted eyes before, which is about what I think I could do, and they still look like they're a bug-eyed coke addict. I don't think the 28mm size works for that detail well.

As for f--k ups, I based my entire ork army in GW sand after I painted them, thinking its about the perfect color for desert sand, so who needs to paint it? Well that was until I found out primer and paint keep it from flaking off everywhere. And you can't paint sand by itself, as it just falls off in clumps. I've recently switched to texture paint on my new models but I'm half tempted to rebase 60+ orks. It scares me to think about accidentally breaking off their feet though :( I feel like that could happen.

I was painting some Chaos terminators, and I went to get some new paint because I ran out of paint. I then used it to neaten up some spots and found that the new paint was very different from the old one. I haven't touched those termis again.